Aro Culture Is Ys I Doubt My Romantic Orientation On Daily Basis Wherever Seeing A Pretty Person But

“friends don’t look at friends that way” yeah maybe you should stop automatically assuming something is romantic without the person themselves outright saying it because you don’t know shit. it’s almost as if it’s normal to smile and feel happy looking at someone you care about and admire.

can’t i look at my friends and my family with a loving gaze because i just really appreciate that they’re in my life and i love being with them and i’m just thinking of all the fun times we’ve had together?? like why do you think you have the right to judge what SOMEONE ELSE feels based on a glance that you know nothing about. you don’t know what they feel. you don’t know shit and stop acting like you do just for the sake of your own comfort.

y’all might think this is some cool angsty love trope but it’s actually quite arophobic. i’ve had friendships ruined because of this. nothing is romantic unless the people involved directly say so. if you want to know if something is romo or not then ASK. some of you don’t understand that someone else’s love life and feelings are not for your own gratification or discussion and it really fucking shows

Anyone else sad they’ll never get to see a live thylacine?  Me too dude. 

An experiment in graphic design– drew the thylacine in walnut ink and the rest is photoshop

"friendzoning"? i think we should talk about romancezoning. as someone who's aro, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable if someone says they're romantically interested in me. i guess it could be a little flattering at first, but the idea of, like, my close friends secretly wanting a romantic relationship instead is. not a pleasant thought.

Do any of y’all (my aro friends and followers) ever feel like you’ve resigned yourself to a life of being a “surplus wheel”?

I mean, my friends are incredible. They don’t try to push me to date since they know I’m aro. They don’t fawn all over their partners when we’re in the room together.

But they show enough affection and happiness that it makes me feel inadequate or like I shouldn’t be there, no matter how much they are clear about wanting me to spend time with them. When they talk about love and how much it means, I feel so disconnected.

I don’t want to be alloromantic. I don’t need that kind of love, but sometimes I feel like I should. I’ve been the third, fifth, and even seventh wheel before. It’s a happy enough place to be until everyone pairs off and you are left staring at your phone, sitting on the floor, alone.

I feel guilty about taking time with my friends because I don’t know why they wouldn’t rather be spending time with their partner. Or if that’s actually the case, and I’m just taking up precious time. I know people can have friends and partners too, but it just feels like I’m standing in the way of something more important.

I know this feeling will pass; I’m just in a bad headspace about it right now. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this IRL because all of my good friends are alloromantic. But as much as I know it will pass, I also know it will return. I’m mostly just venting, but if anyone out there has ideas about what will help, I’m all ears.

IT'S FINALLY JUNE!!!!

So here are a few tips to support aro and ace people during pride month :D

Give them all your money

Share your credit card information with them (make sure to include the correct PIN)

Help them invade Denmark (Bonus points if you're Danish)

This isn't a comprehensive list and every aspec person's needs are different, so feel free to add to this <3

Aro culture is realizing that instead of a romantic relationship you just want to mean something to someone

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Crowns of weary ancients

“Link, I heard a girl’s voice call out to me when I fell. It felt oddly familiar..” “…”

okay so @sevdrag asked for neat things and here is mine:

I FOUND A FOSSIL FOSSILS!

me back in september, driving across the Mojave Desert and camping under the stars to avoid all humans, meeting my parents at their condo in St George, Utah: I wonder if my poking around on geology and paleontology blogs and websites and documentaries and books and online courses has taught me anything yet.

*stumbles across the street in 100 degree heat and peers at some Rocks.*

Huh.

Well now THAT's fuckin odd. It's not like an intrusion of molten something or other; parts of it are just a crust on the surface, but parts are embedded. And it's PARTS.

And that's sandstone behind it. But not dunes, because there's no crossbedding. I think maybe water put it here. There's flowy bits.

Horseshoe crab tails? But some are too big. Plant stems? Again, some seem a little large. Or just some weird rust discoloration from ore, or a very odd sort of mineral that grows like a crystal without being quite regular in shape? But growing in sand/silt? instead of a fluid-filled cavity? Can that happen?

And then there's this. Small tracks on either side of a tail drag? Or a rolling pebble with water ripples on either side?

Fas t forward to May 2021. Vaccinated. Return to St George to meet parents. Visit St. George Dinosaur Discovery museum, which has some of the best-preserved dinosaur tracks in the world on ancient silty mudflats, including a bona-fide dino butt print where a dino sat down on its haunches and then wandered off.

I show my photos to a paleontologist working the desk, and she says, "Oh, that's just petrified wood."

Just. Because it's common in this part of the southwest.

So we go home and I show Mom the rock face. While we're standing back, she points out they're part of an entire fucking TREE lying on its side, branches fanning to the right, partly embedded in the cliff, partly eroded out of it leaving a light imprint in the siltstone.

That dark horizontal bit above the right side of the yardstick is the petrified skin of a treebranch (debarked, I think; there's other places that show a bumpy bark imprint whereas the brown petrified wood bits are smooth.) I think the "tail drag" mark might be a conifer twig with needles.

So I posted THESE to Twitter's #fossilFriday, and the curator of the museum spotted it and said he'd come by to document it, although I don't think he has yet because it's not in a very good state of preservation. Quoth he:

I agree with your identification as a portion of a tree with branches, and trees are very common in the Late Triassic Shinarump Member of the Chinle Formation buried in braided river systems some 230-225 million years ago. Unfortunately, from what I can see from your photos, most of the fossil is missing and I can't make out anything identifiable.

— Dr. Andrew Milner

Which means it just barely postdates the last survivors of the Permian die-off, my buddy Lystrosaurus, but not by much! (wrong part of the world, anyway; this isn't Gondwanaland.)

And after that email exchange I kept searching the cliff and found at least one more tree fossil as well. It's very definitely fossil treeroots from a tree that's lying on its side, but unless the top broke off and is not lying quite at the same angle, it's probably a second tree. It's behind the edge of my parents' neighbors' yard, so hopefully it's well-protected.

More bits of petrified wood from the first tree.

[Most photos May 8-9 2021]

And I'm just stoked, you know? I'm not a geologist, although there's lots of scientists in my family, and my maternal grandfather taught geology at a junior college. I've just gotten interested in this as a hobby of the past 10 years.

And there it is. An honest to gosh fossil tree, maybe one of the first to grow tall again after the end Permian extinction, shading the silty flats of a wide river down to what became lakes or the inland seaway. The first dinosaurs trotted past it, leaving tracks in the silt. That's a real tree that lived for decades or hundreds of years, and it moved in the wind and felt the rain, hundreds of millions of years ago, when the animals and insects that scurried on its bark were almost entirely different from today.

Fossils are amazing.

the zelda that you know