Scrapbook #3: C.L.A.N. (Click For Full-size Image.)

Yes, you’re seeing it right. That’s our first ever doujinshi that’s been out of print. Carouselcycles is very nice to donate her copy for this giveaway.

WHAT YOU GET: The last ever copy of The Melancholy of S’chn T’gai Spock. (42 pages, PG13, Kirk/Spock, high school AU)

HOW DO YOU ENTER:

- ENTER your info here in google form (since tumblr has been known to be assholes about giveaways) for 1 entry - REBLOG for 1 entry (only one reblog will count) - PURCHASE a copy of our newest doujin 1-UP for 3 extra entries (automatic)

WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN VIA RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR ON MONDAY, OCT 14, 2013 @ EDT 7PM. I can ship anywhere, but you will need to keep your askbox open, or check the e-mail you used to purchase our doujin. If the winner doesn’t reply within 24 hours, a new winner will be drawn.

Daily Affirmation 682.

Having sex does not make you human. Wanting sex does not make you human. Feeling sexual attraction does not make you human. You can have, want, or feel some of these things, or all of them, or none of them, and still be human. Humanity is an intrinsic part of your existence. Nobody gets to take it away from you because of your asexuality, regardless of what that means you do and do not want.

one day I’ll have enough money to buy les nereides jewellery 🥲 one day…

https://mamot.fr/@setthemfree/106014810050613790

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/google-testing-its-controversial-new-ad-targeting-tech-millions-browsers-heres

Spotlight on naked Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets books

Transcript below the cut:

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Parvati Holcomb: The Unaccountably Happy Face of the Unreliable

The Outer Worlds, the new space RPG courtesy of Obsidian, helpfully provides your player character with exactly the sort of ragtag gang of misfits which you are probably expecting in such a game. Today, we’re going to talk about the most important of them. 

Parvati Holcomb, likely the first companion you meet and definitely the first companion you can recruit, is a well-written female-character. Her talents for engineering and her incredibly positive and cheerful outlook quickly draw comparison with the character of Kaylee from Firefly (allegedly one of the main inspirations for the character), but there is one very clear difference between the two. 

Parvati Holcomb is an asexual character. 

While the term “asexual” is never actually used in the game, Parvati’s experiences and worries were so obviously born form the real-life experiences of asexual people that I was not the least bit surprised that she had been written by an asexual woman: 

I was, however, properly delighted that Parvati had always been intended to be an asexual character, even before an asexual woman took over as Parvati’s writer; Chris L’Etoile, the original writer, explicitly made the decision to create a warm and loving character, someone who could see the beauty and hope in a failing colony, who could express all the wonder they wanted their players to feel, and then he decided to make her asexual as well. 

The stereotypical ‘link’’ between asexuality and ‘coldness’ is even explicitly referenced by Parvati herself, when she explains her fears about starting a new relationship: “I’m not much interested in… physical stuff. Never have been. Leastways not like other folk seem to be. It’s not that I can’t. I just don’t care for it. It’s been a problem, in the past. The folk who wanted to be with me, back in the Vale? They didn’t - They said I was cold.”

The first response offered to players? “You’re about the warmest person I ever met. To hell with them.” 

Indeed, The Outer Worlds is a game which, over and over again, tells us that Parvati is not cold or unfeeling. This is a young woman who names a robot the moment she fixes it, who worries if the Captain calls the ship’s computer “it”, who checks in with crew members and, in a game with a reputation system (rather than a Mass Effect style morality system), acts as the world’s most adorable conscience. 

And, while Parvati does find her relationship with Junlei complicated, those complications have very little to do with her sexuality and far more to do with her being a young woman, away from home for the first time, and experiencing possibly the first great love of her life. There are miscommunications, a night of drowning sorrows, endless over-analysing of each other’s words and actions, and the need to go to four different worlds just to plan a date. As the player character can say: 

PC: “If you two marry, you’ll be saying, ‘Haha, just kidding. Unless you’re not.’” Parvati: “I resent you saying such, on account of it being uncomfortably likely.”

But once Parvati has worked up the courage to tell Junlei who she is, the relationship works well. Well enough for Parvati to find a new home with Junlei once the fight is over: 

Now, I always expect an Obsidian game to have some awareness of the wider spectrum of human sexuality - Fallout New Vegas included some same-sex relationships, and the player character could be played as straight, gay or bisexual, depending on which perks you picked. But I wasn’t expecting the only great romance subplot in an entire game to include an asexual woman actively pursuing another woman. Were this just one relationship among many, it would still be beautiful, but for it to take centre-stage and not have to share that space with anything else? It’s phenomenal. 

And, just when I think that The Outer Worlds couldn’t get any more lovely, it did this: 

Yep, that’s the option to identify your character explicitly as asexual. There’s even the option just afterwards to clarify your character as aromantic as well, which Parvati takes perfectly in her stride with a nice little nod to the player’s strong relationships with their friends. Either revelation is meant with the same response from Parvati: 

“So we’re… we’re kin-like. That makes me, well - unaccountably happy, Captain. It’s a lonely thing, being different like this.” 

Judging from that reaction, the Captain is likely the first fellow asexual who Parvati has met, and the relief in her voice was such a punch to the gut. Because Parvati’s right - the loneliness of feeling “other” sinks in fast and there’s nothing quite like the relief when you finally feel like maybe you’re not alone after all. 

And the idea that this game and this character might give that moment of relief to someone out there, well, that just makes me unaccountably happy as well.

Selfie Tag

Tagged: @jellydishes​​ ⁌ ⁍ (Thank you~ 🤗 🖤)

Tagging: All other interested parties. @ me in your posts if you try it out! 💄✨ 📸

21 ♥

i told my boyfriend i was demisexual so i had to expalin to him that demisexual is the kind of people who feel sexual attraction to someone with an emotional bond, and he said "yeah just like everyone else"... how i am supposed to react to that? i told him that no, because lot of people is alright with one night stands, but he was insisting everyone was like this..

This is a hard one that I’ve struggled with too, because as demisexuals we know that our experience is fundamentally different, but often times harder to pin down than saying we’re strictly asexual. Here’s how I explained it to my mom. I’m not sure how useful this is, especially since it’s about how *I* experience demisexuality, which might be different than how you or others do, but maybe it’ll help.So imagine that sex is coffee right? People love coffee. Coffee is everywhere. There’s a Starbucks on every corner, coffee drinkers in every TV show and movie, and billboards and ad spots about coffee all the time. People who like coffee might be peculiar about how they want their coffee— maybe they like it with sugar or soy milk, or only in the mornings before 10, or only when they’re studying, only from Starbucks or only from their local coffee house, etc. Or they might not care— they might like coffee no matter when or how it’s made. They’ll buy it from anyone and take it in whatever form because they really like coffee. But they all agree that in general they like coffee.

And then there are people who don’t like coffee at all. They can’t stand it. They don’t want coffee at any point of the day, no matter how it’s made or who makes it. Nothing you can do makes coffee in any way appealing to them. Coffee lovers are generally baffled by this, and some might insist that people who don’t like coffee just haven’t had the right cup, but the fact is that people who don’t like coffee simply just don’t like coffee.

And then there are people like us: we don’t generally like coffee, and we wouldn’t choose to have coffee on our own. Like the people who don’t like coffee, we can go years without a cup of coffee and it doesn’t bother us at all.

But we have a friend who loves coffee, and we love that friend. And the longer we’re friends, the more we want to have coffee with them. Not because coffee has suddenly become our favorite drink, but because we love our coffee-drinking friend and THEY make us want coffee. So we go out for coffee with them, and we enjoy having coffee because we’re having coffee with them. If we weren’t with them, we wouldn’t want coffee.

"But everybody feels that way" isn’t true. Coffee lovers still want coffee even when their conditions for having coffee aren’t met. Just because they’re not drinking coffee right now, or because they might have preferences for when & how they drink coffee, doesn’t mean they stop liking coffee. But for people like us, if we’re not having coffee with that specific person, then we don’t care about coffee. It holds absolutely no appeal or value. We have to have that connection before we ever want coffee. Coffee lovers might want that connection when they have coffee too, but they also generally want coffee as a thing in itself.

That’s the difference between being demisexual and being an allosexual who likes to have emotional connections with their partners. An allosexual person still likes and wants sex as a thing itself, even if the conditions for having sex aren’t being met. They think about and desire sex outside of the conditions they set for engaging in the actual act. A demisexual person doesn’t care about sex as a thing in itself, because sex is inherently tied to emotional bonding for them. We don’t think about sex as an act involving us unless it’s under those conditions.

That may or may not be the worst analogy ever, I honestly don’t know, sorry. It seemed to work for my mom, but that might be because she really likes coffee *shrugs*

If anyone following this blog has any resources on how to respond to that type of response they’d like to direct the anon to, please let me know so I can post them!

Hope that helps!