A tumblr ban hot take

Anyone remember that time that Google tried to ban adult content on Blogger, and then took it back three days later?  No?

Tumblr announced that they are banning adult content, starting on December 17.  According to their policy,

Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.

The policy includes additional exceptions for breastfeeding, health-related situations, political speech, and nudity in art.

This morning I saw a lot of doom and gloom about the ban, which I would deem justified.  Most obviously, this hurts sex workers and erotic illustrators, who may be using tumblr as a source of advertising or income, and are now being evicted.  But more broadly, it’s a big concern for fandoms.  Although not all fans are interested in erotic art, fandoms are interconnected communities, and you can’t just excise the adult content without affecting everyone.  It is likely that entire fan communities will just get up and leave.  There is precedent for this in Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal.

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FTB is back up

FTB was down for most of yesterday, and Matthew Herron explains why.  Short version: technical difficulties.

Anyway, for people who follow me using RSS, you should know that the RSS feed might behave a bit strangely.  On my RSS reader, the post I had scheduled yesterday about origami spirals doesn’t show up.  Some of the recent Pharyngula posts don’t show up either.  Maybe it will sort itself out later, but in the mean time I wanted to give a heads up.

Origami: Spiral creases

A square sheet of silver foil paper, with 4 spiral creases radiating from the center

Four 45 degree spiral creases

This is going to be one of those origami posts where I talk way too much about math.  But before I get to the math, I will explain how you can make one of these things entirely with ordinary arts and craft tools.

“Ordinary tools” is the relevant bit here, since my understanding is that experts in curved-crease origami don’t use ordinary tools, they use things like vinyl cutters.  When I first tried making these, I could not find any instructions for how to make these models using ordinary tools (I later found an article by Ekaterina Lukasheva), so when I finally figured out a method, I wanted to share it.

Making a template

Before we draw the creases directly on the paper, we need to make a template.  The template ensures that each of the four curves are identical to each other.

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Some aromantic basics

I don’t do enough ace blogging around here. I zipped right through Asexual Awareness Week without saying a thing! But let’s not talk about asexuality, let’s talk about something a bit different: aromanticism.

I don’t like to think of myself as writing a definitive guide to aromanticism, since I’m not aromantic myself, so I’m just going to keep this casual in tone.

Romantic orientation

“Aromantic” is constructed in an analogous way to “asexual”. Asexual means not experiencing sexual attraction, and so aromantic means not experiencing romantic attraction. Alternatively, “aromantic” might just mean not wanting romantic relationships, the definition is a bit flexible like that. Either the noun or adjective form is fine, and “aro” is a common abbreviation.

Aromanticism as a concept has had a long history, since the beginning of online asexual communities in the late 90s (although terminology may have changed since then). Once you get a group of asexual people talking to each other, two of the very first narratives to appear are: asexuals who want relationships and don’t want anything to do with sex, and asexuals who don’t want anything to do with romance. It’s natural to make a distinction between these two experiences, and the name for that distinction is romantic vs aromantic. (In some places, they use “alloromantic” instead of “romantic”, in the same way that “allosexual” is a common term for “non-asexual”.)

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The sexual recession: an ace perspective

“Why are young people having so little sex?” asks the title of a new article in The Atlantic. The article is also summarized in video form. The article reports that the number of high-schoolers who have had intercourse declined from 54% to 40% in the period from 1991 to 2017. The author writes,

But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments.

The author says the decline in sex is not just among teenagers, but among young adults too. Among people in their early 20s, 15% say they haven’t had sex since becoming adults, as compared to 6% among Gen-Xers. The author calls this a “sexual recession”. What follows is a long list of speculations about what could be causing it–be it porn, dating apps, helicopter parents, bad sex, or inhibition.

I will offer an unsympathetic, perhaps callous perspective–this being largely a straight people problem, and me being a gay ace guy. Yeah, I really don’t think this is as much of a problem as the article makes it out to be.

Flipping scripts

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Trump blames self for fires

Around here, the big news is that everything is on fire!

Well, the fire is a bit too far away for me to personally to be in danger.  Nonetheless, it’s impossible to ignore.  See, the air quality took a sharp downturn.  You can smell it in the air, see it in the sky, and people roam the streets with N95 masks.  Businesses are all proceeding as usual, but personally, as an asthmatic, I’ve been trying to avoid going outside.  My partner and I decamped from our bedroom because something about the ventilation is allowing dust particles into that room.

I don’t know what to say.  People died, and cities were burnt to the ground.  Not much entertainment to squeeze out of that, except maybe a few sad puns about Paradise lost.

Oh I know, we could look at what horrible thing Trump has said.  Maybe that will brighten things up.

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Link Roundup: November 2018

Honestly I wasn’t paying that much attention this month, so there aren’t too many links.

The 2018 Asexual Community Survey was released.  If you can spare 20 minutes or so, please take the survey!

Fellow FTBlogger Great American Satan needs some money, and is taking art commissions!

Asexuality in Japan: An interview (video) – Vesper has a great interview with a couple asexuality activists in Japan.  Interesting tidbit: what we call “asexual” in the English community is usually divided into two groups in Japanese, with “asexual” referring to aromantic asexuals, and “nonsexual” referring to romantic asexuals.  If that interests you, watch the interview to learn more.

Catfishing and Conspiracy in Groves – This is a human interest story about a very young openly gay councilmember in a small town in Texas.  Someone got their hands on some nude photos that he exchanged consensually on Grindr, and released them to the media.  Other councilmembers filed a petition to get him recalled.  The town comes off looking rather bad.  And the pastor who insists that it’s not about homophobia gives the most unbelievable excuse.  I looked up the outcome later; he was recalled.

Pronouns (video) – Contrapoints offers analytic arguments for why calling a trans woman a “he” is just false, and not merely rude.  If I were to address the topic, I would probably not make much in the way of analytic arguments, I would just say I’m not having any of it.  Well, I’m glad we have Natalie around.