domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
I’m sorry about this. From what you’ve said, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Unfortunately, I think the truth is that people who reach their 30s without marrying or being in an LTR on the way to marriage are often that way for a reason. She’s in her 30s, and going back to college for a degree with a tenuous relationship to direct employment — that points to aimlessness. That’s understandable in your early to mid 20s, much less understandable in your 30s.
I’ll counterpoint the cynicism by saying that I’ve never encountered this kind of instability from “geeky neurodivergent asexual” women. Of course, when I found about the asexuality things ended because of the obvious incompatibility. For what it’s worth, your interlocutor does not at all sound to me like their behavior matches the cluster — that cluster of people is usually more shy, reserved, and actually confused by sexuality, not manipulative about it.
It's hard to describe the anecdotes without context, but the asexual people I've met just didn't understand the concept of how a relationship is different from a friendship. I've been asked what is supposed to differentiate them by someone in this category before. I wasn't convinced about the existence of absolute asexuality when I first encountered it, but meeting a few of these people and seeing how absolutely bewildered they are by sexuality led me to the conclusion they they really don't have the sexual feelings that most people do. I've never met the "asexual but romantic" people, which seems to be the identification of your friend here; every asexual person I've met has clearly been as confused by romance as by sexuality, or talked about it analytically and outside the frame of direct experience.
But perhaps what's going on is one of two things -- she has relatively normal sexual feelings, but has general identity instability that makes her uncomfortable with it unless lubricated by alcohol, which seems most likely to me. Or, alternatively, she is asexual, and her confusion about the concept of sexuality manifests as an intense conflict resulting in the craziness you've encountered. Your choice quotes, "I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush," and "pretty people dont light their own cigarettes" just read as woefully neurotypical and narcissistic in a normie way. This is perhaps a case of a neurotypical person with identity instability latching onto concepts like asexuality and autism and queerness as validation for her weirdness. I'm not a psychiatrist, but this has what is coloquially called "BPD chick energy" all over it.
I run into her again a few weeks later (this is 2024) and she gives me a big ole body hug and invites me to hang out, making me internally panic. There's other people around so I can't really have a frank conversation with her. At the end of the evening, I ask her if she'd like to get dinner sometime, so we can talk in private and I can hash out exactly how she feels about me. She reacts poorly.
Talk about mixed signals! That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me think you're just dealing with garden variety crazy. "Let's hang out, but no I won't go to dinner" shortly after "you ruined my birthday"... especially combined with the "made me feel not okay about you" thing you got a year later, makes it extremely likely that this is a person with serious confusion about her romantic identity and desires, who over time built a positive or neutral situation into a decidedly negative one.
You said in your hypothetical rant that she said something like "all us freaks have is each other." Well, that sounds like someone that has made an identity out of weirdness. And I don't think it's healthy. I've certainly bonded with women in that way -- you know, "we have this in common and we understand each other like other people don't." But there's a time and a place, and calling yourself a "freak" when you do that just makes them sound like they're committed to weirdness not as an obstacle, or as a healthy part of personality, but as an active aversion and identitification with rebellion from the norm for no reason.
I'm sorry that a connection that meant so much to you at the time became so negative. But unfortunately the connection you had was always fictive, time-limited. This is not a person capable of stable bonds. There was no relationship to be had with her. And though she holds the power to destroy aspects of your life in her hands, she also seems much more interested in destroying aspects of her life -- including the connection she made with you, which may well have had the capacity to be incredibly meaningful to her, too. You're collateral damage in the mess she's made of herself. I don't say that beacuse I think you should sympathize with her, but because I think you should remind yourself that her own life is hot garbage, and certainly seems lonely. It's not like she rejected you for bigger and better things; she rejected you for smaller and worse things. She's the one who lost.
iprayiam3
6d ago
Firstly, this sucks, but I would expect it will ultimately blow over if you ignore her. These kinds of interactions run on attention, and when she gets none from you there's nothing left for her to get out of it.
Secondly, the lesson to learn here is that this:
I liked her more when she talked about Hellboy and her Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction.
was always a function of this:
"I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush."
It was never going to be some unhappy coincidence. No, better luck next time. If you select for girls that aren't like normal girls, they will end up not like normal girls. If you like a girl for her atypically nonfemale coded interests and interactions, she's going to be nonfemale coded in other ways.
This comes up again and again and again with spergy types chasing MPDG's with attractive 'buddy' interests attached to boobs. But her depressingly NCP reddit tier asexual text is somewhat correct. She nerded out with you about comic books, which you admit is atypical. That's a sign that she's not interacting with you in a predictably girl-guy way.
But let's imagine the opposite. You meet a male friend who's super sensitive and warm and emotionally available. He doesn't share your hobby interests, which is atypical for guys you select for as friends. But dammit this guy shows you attention and makes you feel special. He's emotionally available, fun, playful and you feel refreshingly wanted. One day he makes a move on you, and you recoil. He's GAY?!
Are you actually suprised? This doesn't invalidate all of the friendship gestures as completely ingenuine. Nor do I think none of MPDG's flirting was real. But overall, you get what you get.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6d ago
I laughed very hard at this, but to go turbo CPA autism most tax authorities have provisions for immediate write-offs of small (hah)/cheap assets like this that aren't worth the effort to depreciate
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
6d ago
The funny thing is that 40k bolters are recoilless guns, if I remember correctly.
No groveling apology will be forthcoming. Allow me a therapeutic hypothetical rant.
I. Liked. You. Emphasis on the past tense, but I genuinely liked you and thought you might like me. Then again, I'm bad at reading social cues, what with being a sperg and all. You did put that together, right? I had you pinged immediately, didn't need you to announce your label. I thought you might understand me, but I guess I'm just a straight male to you. Speaking of, if you don't want straight guys chasing after you, don't fucking call them pretty while they're gazing at you like a concussed puppy. We've both had to put effort into learning the social shit that comes naturally to everyone else, don't tell me you haven't figured out by now that when you pay too much attention to dudes, they get silly ideas. You might be able to live in a leftist queer neurodivergent hugbox, but some of us have to make our way in normieland. So much for 'all us freaks have is each other.'
I wasn't molesting you while you were blackout drunk. We were having a lucid discussion about Tieflings in various editions of D&D, Fullmetal Alchemist deep lore, your siblings, your involvement with Occupy Wall Street, and cheesy noir tropes. I don't know of any rule that you're not allowed to make out with people on their birthday, you don't get to make up imaginary rules when we both barely have a handle on the real ones.
You're not okay with me? I'm not okay with you. I've had "pretty people don't light their own cigarettes" echoing around in my head ever since. That night was the closest I've felt to anyone in five fucking years. I ruined your birthday? You stepped on my heart and scolded me for getting your shoes dirty. And now you're throwing around scary phrases like sexual assault? And pretending I haven't already apologized? Check your text message history, it's right there, I have receipts.
You want an in-person apology? Here it is: I'm sorry I spoke to you in the first place. I'm sorry I turned up to the birthday outing you publicly advertised. I'm sorry I gave you an effortful, thoughtful gift to try to get your attention. I'm sorry I kissed you, I'm sorry I kissed you again. I'm sorry I offered you a ride home, I'm sorry we held hands while walking down the street, I'm sorry I touched your hair in the car, I'm sorry I kissed you after dropping you off safely at home and saying goodbye. And I'm sorry I tried to politely wish you well in passing a year later after I thought we'd already settled the matter.
birb_cromble
6d ago
few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images.
One of the more interesting aspects of the revolt was users getting temp bans for posting objectionable content.
The objectionable content was screenshots of the site's own ads.
LiberalRetvrn
6d ago
Obviously people can't be protected from all harm. When I said that Christianity hurts people I meant more in the sense that viruses or natural disasters hut people. It's nobody's fault in particular that Christianity exists, it's a mental parasite whose purpose is to perpetuate itself. It's inevitable that such mental parasites will exist.
When I said that people shouldn't be allowed to hurt other people under liberalism, I meant in a literal sense. You shouldn't be able to use force to coerce other people, or restrict their freedom of speech or bodily autonomy.
Why your criteria and not mine?
Because I said so. At the end of the day morality is subjective, and it's about who has the most power to enforce their beliefs. I hope that liberalism can build up that power, and then use it benignly. Of course there is no objective reason why freedom, bodily autonomy, and free speech are correct.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
If adopted generally, the NGSW would be by a substantial margin the heaviest weapon ever carried by the line in human history.
Seems like the DoD should also start a GMO program to produce soldiers which can actually use these weapons effectively.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
There’s always a reason to be careful.
For example, I really really disagree that classical liberalism is bad news. It outcompeted most other ideologies for good reason. History gave us plenty of examples of the kind of ideas which profitably exploit totalitarianism, and they’re much worse.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
The pro-trans position is more like “X and Y are meaningful, but you are sorting some people incorrectly.” This is internally consistent. It explains the vast majority of gender CW issues.
But maybe I didn’t understand your observation. If X and Y really weren’t meaningful, why would they have to be disjoint?
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Imgur (WP) is an image/video/meme sharing board from ca 2010. Its heyday was before reddit introduced native image hosting in 2016.
Browsing imgur has been a somewhat guilty pleasure of mine. Compared to bigger social media platforms, what I really like about it is that imgur does not optimize for maximizing the time I engage with it. While Tiktok would happily provide you with videos most likely to make you stay on the app until you died of thirst, with imgur, you can spend half an hour a day scrolling through the trending (i.e. upvoted) images. If you want to waste more time, you can scroll through the feed of user submissions, but eventually you will just hit the end of that feed.
Like most internet platforms, the people who upvote images on imgur are leaning broadly left. Trans-friendly, Trump-bashing (plenty of it rather stupid, like "Trump is a pedophile"), but a lot of the content is plain unpolitical, like videos of machines producing wire fences or cats behaving in ways humans tend to find funny.
A few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images. I think they broke notifications, and the parent company medialabs had fired most of the staff and replaced them with AI.
For a day, imgur was full of a photoshopped image of John Oliver giving medialabs the finger and saying "fuck you, business daddy". More recently, people would post/upvote images which either were completely black or would contain NSFW content such as boobs, with the idea that advertisers would not like that.
Compare to the Reddit API restriction protests of 2023, and the demise of freenode in 2021.
I think one difference is that Reddit has more of a moat than imgur, though. For one thing, the software stack to run reddit seems rather less trivial to replace (though rDrama works well enough for themotte). And the reddit communities are organized into different subreddits, which makes moving them a coordination problem. By contrast, a lot of content on imgur is copied from other social media platforms by users, so reposting it on another site would be trivial.
Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?
Anyway, I hope Ratty is a big earner because if they're going to have their own litter, there's going to be a lot of little paws pattering around the house.
To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all. And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic? Though yeah, I'm arguing about pretend human animals which is totally unrealistic in the first place. But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.
(Also, I am now wincing at the idea of a mouse pregnant by a squirrel. More likely to explode while pregnant with the growing baby/babies, than to be able to successfully give birth to a hybrid squouse).
HereAndGone
6d ago
I agree with your points, but since this is (we are assuming) a trans person writing their self-insert furry character, then "I am a rat and you are a mouse" take on extra meanings. And the characteristics described are ones where rats are different to mice: mice have cute little short noses and hairy tales, rats have big pointy noses and long, hairless, tails. Picking those characteristics instead of "I want babies with your white fur" or "as tall as you are" reads, to me, like a trans person picking the traits where they don't pass as the gender they present as/the traits that made them not fit in to their assigned gender at birth, traits they find ugly or dysphoric, and then this is the fix-it by cute feminine (very femme) mousie loving the ugly bits and finding them in fact attractive.
Wokeness imposes a universal moral value system, it tells you how you must act and think. Liberalism is about freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it.
All moral systems are by necessity universal moral systems, because that is, at the end of the day, what the word "moral" means in this context. To a first approximation, all moral systems allow "freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it." There is no objective definition of "hurt" available, nor will there ever be one, nor can a given definition be kept stable over long periods of time.
From the frame you are using, Wokeness and American conservativism are both isomorphic to Liberalism, the three being differentiated only by mutually-exclusive definitions of morally-significant harm. You yourself have already posited that Christianity "hurts" those who adopt it or are exposed to it, which seems like a perfect illustration of the problem; "hurts" by what definition, on what criteria? Why those criteria and not others? Why your criteria and not mine? Liberalism begs these questions while providing no answers within its framework, and so people recognize that under liberal structures, the least-cost alternative is to establish their own answer through socio-political dominance. Hence, Wokeness and Conservatism.
We cannot get back to the prior liberal order, because that liberal order depended on ignorance of the subjective nature of morally-significant harm to exist. Now that this subjective nature approaches common knowledge, liberalism devolves into an incoherent tautology: "We should tolerate good things and not tolerate bad things." Sure, everyone knows that. The problem is that we have no common definition of which things are good and bad, and likely never will again.
HereAndGone
6d ago
I don't know who any of these people are and I don't know why I'm supposed to care.
Guys in two different sets of fake violence 'sports' get into real fight? Who cares?
Oh look blacks are violent thugs? If that is the real point of this post, then yeah I definitely don't care to fight over this one. If someone is going to post this sort of thing, then at least be honest about "this is what I want to say" and don't give a potted history of fake wrestling, some other boxing-substitute and a star of it I never heard about in order to cover it with a fig leaf as the lead-in to "oh look blacks are violent thugs".
LiberalRetvrn
6d ago
Classical liberalism is larval wokeness
Strongly disagree, classical liberalism and wokeness are opposites. Wokeness imposes a universal moral value system, it tells you how you must act and think. Liberalism is about freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it.
by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness
Well I think it's fair to say that the illiberal side of the spectrum is winning. Currently the culture war in the west is dominated by two puritanical ideologies, wokeness and conservatism, competing with each other. But that doesn't mean liberalism doesn't exist anymore as a concept. We can always go back to it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
It’s used quite often in conversation and even in marketing. It’s obviously a metaphor, but there’s really no equivalent for women. There’s no thought that being too into masculine things (like sports) makes you less of a woman, but there are numerous activities that men avoid for being too “feminine” and thus emasculating to consider. Art is a big one, and it’s almost assumed that any male who is into art is basically a sissy and probably gay on top of that. A woman never really has the same consideration. She can hunt deer, field dress it and drag it to camp secure in her womanhood. She can box and beat the crap out of people and still be seen as a woman. On the accomplishment side, a male would not be considered a man unless he had a reasonably high status job, his own place, and a non-junker car. He’s less than for that. A woman can have no job, no car, and live with mom and dad and still be seen as a woman. And on it goes. Men have to work to be man enough to be considered a man by other men and by women. If you fail, you’re stuck until you manage to leave and go accomplish masculinity.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6d ago
much like managers prefer optimistic timelines that turn out to be wrong over accurate, pessimistic timelines...
That is very much not the case in my experience. Managers would far rather be told the truth than what they want to hear (though obviously they prefer it if the truth is what they want to hear).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6d ago
I remember that post! And damn, it's already been a year.
As back then, I still have no actual advice to give. My personal inclination would be to tough it out - according to your version, you haven't done any wrong, so unless you suddenly realize that you did indeed "sexually assault" her, it wouldn't do to grovel just to appease a crazy woman. If this ruins your social life, then...yeah, I get it, that sucks, but better have it ruined that way than by making yourself become an absolute doormat.
aqouta
6d ago
Yes, I don't go down the rabbit hole of porn either and keep my alcohol tastes to mid shelf stuff for the same reason.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
When I see these arguments all I can think of is: How? How will anyone do this or enforce what you are proposing?
Look, I think almost everybody here is in agreement with you about the extreme political/ideological difficulties in addressing this problem. To the extent that Americans are even willing to openly acknowledge the existence of the problem at all, we are viciously polarized about the root causes of it, and about what an attempt to fix it would even look like. One side (presented somewhat uncharitably) thinks we just need to expropriate more resources and guilt from the dominant white culture and the problem will somehow fix itself; the other side is hotly divided over whether genetics play any role at all, and the anti-genetics side has spent years screeching about the evils of eugenics, so they’re certainly not going to assent to any attempt to address the problem on a genetic/heritability level.
The practical difficulties of disentangling the genetic and cultural factors is a real one, but not a priori insurmountable. The existence of genetically-identical (or at least nearly identical) populations split along cultural lines, with large downstream effects in terms of life outcomes, is trivially observable. (North Korea vs. South Korea being the most obvious one.) We can infer from this that the reverse is achievable; undoing the cultural divide would ameliorate the differences in outcomes.
Now, with American blacks, we don’t have such a starkly-clear control group. We do have American descendants of Igbo immigrants, whose life outcomes are very markedly better than ADOS blacks; however, since Igbos are a fairly endogenous genetic ingroup and are not genetically identical to the ADOS founding population, it’s difficult to disambiguate to what extent genetics explain the difference. (Although at the very least it deals a powerful blow to the thesis that white racism against people with dark skin is the entire root cause of blacks’ worse life outcomes.)
Ultimately I think you and I are in agreement that the idea of bringing black life outcomes into complete parity with white life outcomes is a pipe dream, short of a decades-long coordinated eugenics program. (And maybe even that wouldn’t be enough.) Since that’s not going to happen, we can at least try to fiddle with the cultural dials in whatever way we can; perhaps we can draw some useful conclusions from that regarding the extent to which culture contributes to the life outcomes we’re observing.
Skulldrinker
6d ago
She's not really part of my social circle, she just goes to the same pub my RPG club meets at. She vaguely knows one person I know, and I definitionally don't want to fuck any woman in her social circle.
Checking IRS Publication 334, I see a section called De Minimis Safe Harbor for Tangible Property that indicates a limit of 5 k$ per item for such write-offs in the US.
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