Just another person on the internet. Goes by the alias 'Werewolf', but you can
call me 'Werewolf'.
Posts shared here are from my actual blog, found at: https://talkingtoavoidcalledtheinternet.wordpress.com/
He/Him. CisHet Aromantic & Greysexual man from the UK.
Otherwise, key points about me:
I live in the UK
📝 I'm a Blogger (see website above)
🥋 I'm a Martial Artist (Jujutsu)
🎌 I'm learning Japanese
🖖 I'm a Trekkie / Whovian
🏳️🌈 I'm a CisHet, Aromantic, White man. (He /Him.)
As the title implies, this post is a follow up to a previous post of mine titled "Am I Asexual?"
I'm not going to lie, this post was hard to write. What I thought was going to be a quick follow up based on a reply and a couple things I forgot to add to the original post, spiraled into a couple months of self doubt and the essay you're about to see.
this is a post about censorship and setting your own media boundaries
my mom is a professional film critic. when i was a kid, she'd often take me with her to film festivals and let me see whichever films i was interested in with her. now, the thing you've gotta understand about film festivals is that pretty much all the films being shown there have not seen any kind of wide release yet; maybe they've played at a few other festivals, maybe this is the first-ever public showing. iirc many of the films didn't even have official ratings yet
which is all to say: my mom took little ~10 year old me to watch films that she knew basically nothing about. she had a 1-2 sentence description of the film from the festival guide. sometimes she'd have a press kit with more info. so she may know that a film is about, say, a serial killer, but be unsure how explicit the violence would be
so when we were walking into movies together and she wasn't sure how heavy/dark/violent/sexual it was gonna be, she'd tell me beforehand "hey, this film might end up having stuff in it that makes you uncomfortable. i need to stay through the whole film because it's my job, so if you get scared, your job is to decide if you can keep watching and go out to the lobby if you can't. get some popcorn and i'll find you after the movie is over."
out of all the countless screenings i watched with her, i only remember walking out of one (a movie about a school shooting). i hit a point where i realized "oh, i'm not feeling fun-scared anymore, i'm feeling Real Scared", so i quietly left. one of my mom's friends saw me in the lobby and asked where my mom was, and i explained what happened, and she chatted with me for a while. i got some popcorn. i checked out the arcade games in the corner. by the time the movie was over, i was feeling fine, and now as an adult i don't even remember what the exact moment was that freaked me out so bad i had to leave
similarly, starting several years before that, i remember a few nights where i was having trouble falling asleep and feeling pretty restless, so i'd go out to the living room and ask my parents if i could watch whatever tv show/movie they were watching with them. and they'd say "yep, you can, but this our time to pick what's on the tv, so if you don't like what we're watching you can go back to your bedroom and read until you're sleepy". there were a handful of times when i decided that the thing they were watching was too scary, so i left. the rest of the time, i stayed, and it ended up being an interesting exposure to tv shows and movies i wouldn't have otherwise seen
the points i'm drawing to here are:
exposing kids to media that's "too mature" for them is Good For Them, Actually. adults have a tendency to way underestimate how much kids can handle! i watched mulholland drive when i was like 9! my favorite cartoon in elementary school was futurama!
teaching kids how to judge for themselves when they need to stop engaging with a media experience does a much better job at setting them up to have a healthy relationship with media than just banning them from anything deemed Too Mature For Kids
the ability to recognize "this media is upsetting me, so it's my responsibility to walk away from it and stop engaging" is a critical skill that is actually not that hard to develop, but for some reason a lot of young adults on the internet have apparently decided that they're permababies who are physically incapable of doing something i learned how to do in first grade
I have been thinking about which artists I listen to and when, and how bothered I am by listening or not listening to music. Now it should be said, this isn't the first time I've thought about this, having written a damn similar post 3 years ago.
It's actually because of that previous post I've decided to write this post today. Evidently, that is a thought that still needs unpacking.
Today’s the day! ‘The Other A in LGBTQIA+’ by AUREA is officially out today! Dive into the powerful, personal stories of the aromantic community—our voices, our experiences, our truth. Read more about it here: https://www.aromanticism.org/en/news-feed/our-book-the-other-a-in-lgbtqia-coming-out-now. Grab your copy now and help us celebrate this milestone for aromantic visibility!
[Image description: light green square graphic on a white background. Large text on the graphic reads: "Today's the day! 'The Other A in LGBTQIA+' by AUREA is officially out today!" Smaller text below it reads: "Dive into the powerful, personal stories of the aromantic community— our voices, our experiences, our truth. Grab your copy now and help us celebrate this milestone for aromantic visibility!" Below the graphic to the right is the cover of the book 'The Other A in LGBTQIA+'. At the bottom left of the image is AUREA's logo. There are squiggly patterns in the colours of the aromantic flag across the background.]
This story has been a long time coming. Back in November 2022, I wrote about "Steve", a student who joined the Jujitsu class I help run not just from another club, but from another governing body as well.
He joined us as a brown belt, one away from his black belt (1st Dan / Shodan) but wasn't bothered about earning his black. He just wanted to train. That remained the case for about 5-6 years until one day he decided he didn't want to just train. He now wanted his black belt.
AUREA’s book publication is approaching! ‘The Other A in LGBTQIA+’ is a collection of personal stories, insights, and experiences. Out May 21st—pre-order your copy today and support aromantic visibility!
[Image description: light green square graphic on a white background. Large text on the graphic reads: "AUREA's book publication is approaching!" Smaller text below reads: "Out May 21st - pre-order your copy today and support aromantic visibility!" Below the graphic to the right is the cover of the book 'The Other A in LGBTQIA+'. At the bottom left of the image is AUREA's logo. There are squiggly patterns in the colours of the aromantic flag across the background.]
I got the itch to play Fallout 4 again. This would be my 15th(?) playthrough now? Yeah I've played it a lot, so what.
My last playthrough was actually part way through a 'Sim Settlements 2' run, which I seem to have abandoned in December 2024. I don't recall how far I got into it, only that for whatever reason I was playing in Survival mode and with a lightsaber mod. Since then however Bethesda released the 'Anniversary Edition'.
All of these things have been a bunch of little things that haven't been worth their own posts, but now feels like a good time to amalgamate them into one.
It was nearly a year ago that we got the confirmation that Grandma has Alzheimer's Disease. Shortly after that she was moved into a care home and we adopted her cat Tinkerbell.
'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'
and the end result is
'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'
like no i'm good actually. you might be aware that i already have one
Remember when Jodie Whitaker regenerated into David Tenant and rather than wearing the previous doctors clothes like every single new who doctor before him he magically regenerated with his own fuckass suit because rtd said her outfit which was specifically designed to be androgynous was too feminine for David Tenant to wear and it would look silly. It was all over from that moment. Like it was over. The fact that she even regenerated into David Tenant in the first place was bad enough. Anyway.
This is another one of those thoughts that's been rattling around my head for a while, and which I need to write down to make it make sense.
For the record I've only been thinking about this in terms of aromanticism, but I think it can also equally apply to asexuality. With that in mind I am going to stick with just aromanticism for the sake of this post, but feel free to substitute in asexuality if you want.
Let's suppose everything in our lives gives us a quantifiable happiness score. More mundane and everyday things give a smaller scores, and bigger more impactful things have bigger scores.
These numbers are totally arbitrary and just used to make a point, but for example:
Did you eat breakfast today? +5
Did you get enough sleep? +5
Do you have pets? +30
Do you have your own car? +30
Do you have trusted friends? +30
Do you have a roof over your head? +50
Do you have a loving partner? +50
Do you have children? +50
Total = 250
All these things add up, big or small. We all have different scores, and how much happiness those things gives you might vary from day-to-day. You might own a car but it's a rusty piece of shit, so only +20. Then you buy a new one; +40! But after a while the novelty of a new car wears off and it stops being 'new', but you still have a car; +30.
The point being, that consciously or unconsciously, we all keep a running total of our own happiness score. So when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, you add up all the things they have to work out their happiness score, and compare it to your own.
When alloromantic people think about aromantic people they will invariably put themselves in our shoes and come to the conclusion that either we are less happy, or they would be less happy; they can't understand how we can be just as happy as they are.
Let's take the list from earlier and look at it again, this time from the perspective of an allo comparing themselves to an non partnering aro:
Did you eat breakfast today? +5
Did you get enough sleep? +5
Do you have pets? +30
Do you have your own car? +30
Do you have trusted friends? +30
Do you have a roof over your head? +50
Do you have a loving partner?
Do you have children?
Total = 150
Oh no! Only a score of 150 compared to my 250! You must be so depressed!
But the thing alloromantics don't understand is we aros seem to have a hidden multiplier stat. This is where the 'math' comes in! You only get +30 points from having trusted friends, but I get a 2.5x multiplier!
Did you eat breakfast today? +5
Did you get enough sleep? +5
Do you have pets? +30 x1.2 (36)
Do you have your own car? +30
Do you have trusted friends? +30 x2.5 (75)
Do you have a roof over your head? +50 x2.5 (125)
Do you have a loving partner?
Do you have children?
Total = 276
Realistically we only get that multiplier on select things, or that multiplier will vary depend on what it is. Me being aro isn't going to make my breakfast any better!
This is how I rationalise this - Do you know how much I value having my own home when I am the only one paying for it? A lot more than you do when you have a partner to help you. Do you know how much we value our friends when we know one day they will lose interest in us to be with their spouse? They (in theory) now have a guaranteed friend for life, but abandon us.
Does this analogy overly simplify what is the human experience down to bare mathematics? Yes of course. It's not practical in our everyday lives because we don't have visible stats. We aren't players in an RPG and no one is an N.P.C. in someone else's life.
At the very least, I think it could help alloromantics understand that we aren't unhappy in our lives, or that if we are, it's for more nuanced reasons.
I read Psychology at university. Supposedly that's the 'correct' way to describe your time at university; you declare which subject you 'read'.
You should know by now that I failed university in the end, and while I do blame that in large part to failing the stats module, that's not the whole story. Let's pretend for a moment that I passed that module. My grades weren't that great. They were in fact borderline failing.
"Do you tend to assume the best in others until proven otherwise, or vice versa?"
I'd say I'm fairly neutral on balance.
See on the whole, I do think most people are kind. That they don't mean to be mean. It's just that people have different definitions of what 'mean' is. Person 'A' might say something to Person 'B' and mean well, but come across as rude.
"If you had to choose between having a personal chef, a housekeeper, or a personal trainer, which would you pick?"
Right off the bat, it's not the housekeeper. Unless I was living in a mansion, I have no need of other people cleaning my house for me, I can manage just fine.
Which means it's a fight between the chef or personal trainer.
