Hallo, Aro Is A Series Of Flash Fiction Stories About Allosexual Aromantic Characters Navigating Friendship,

INFP Problems #1

INFP: *Is comfortable enough with a person to start speaking about their life*

INFP: *Talks for 10 minutes straight*

INFP inside: *Halfway through their rant* Oh no what if I'm boring this person... what if they don't care, what if they think I'm annoying?

INFP: So anyway... what do you think? *nervous laugh*

INFP inside: Please don't hate me.

Ironychan Presents: ten animals that used to be way bigger than they are now. I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) featuring modern animals that look prehistoric.  This is the opposite: prehistoric animals that look strikingly like their modern relatives, except for the part where they were PANTS-SHITTINGLY GIGANTIC.  (Pictures from all over the Internet, chosen with an emphasis on ones that show just how pants-shittingly gigantic these beasts were.) ALLIGATORS - Deinosuchus rugosus (Late Cretaceous) Looked very much like an ordinary alligator such as you might find in your backyard if you’re unfortunate enough to live in Florida - except that it was about forty feet long and weighed darn near twenty thousand pounds.  This animal literally ate dinosaurs for breakfast, and I can’t think of anything more supremely badass than that. SEA TURTLES - Archelon ischyros (Late Cretaceous) The genus name of this bad boy means ‘king of the turtles’ and I don’t think anybody’s gonna argue.  Built very much like a modern leatherback, Archelon was a good fifteen feet long and tipped the scales at five thousand pounds.  Paleontologists speculate that they ate giant squid, probably because they can’t think of anything else that would sustain a turtle this big. SHARKS - Carcharocles megalodon (Early Pleistocene) Megalodon looked enough like a modern Great White Shark that some scientists place it in the same genus, but it was bigger than any great white outside of an Italian horror movie: sixty feet long with a gape you could drive a car into.  It ate whales, which we know because we’ve found fossil whale bones with giant shark teeth still stuck in them.   CONDORS - Argentavis magnificens (Late Miocene) Lest you think the sea had a monopoly on gargantuan nightmare beasts, I give you the largest flying bird that ever lived, with a wingspan of some twenty-five feet.  Most likely a scavenger, this is a bird that could literally have carried off a human corpse, had there been any humans in South America six million years ago. MILLIPEDES - Arthropleura armata (Late Carboniferous) Do you hate creepy-crawlies?  Don’t go time-travelling.  Arthropleura was a millipede eight feet long.  It was the biggest land-based invertebrate that ever lived, and one of the largest land animals of its time, period.  Scientists believe it was a peaceful herbivore, but should you disregard my advice about time travel, you probably still want to avoid pissing it off. MONITOR LIZARDS - Megalania prisca (Late Pleistocene) The largest living lizard is the Komodo Dragon, which is a pretty gigantic and horrifying animal on its own.  Scientists disagree on how big Megalania was, but most estimates range from twenty to thirty feet, and like its modern relatives, it was also venomous.  Astonishingly, these were around only forty thousand years ago, and the first people to settle in Australia probably saw them.  Even more astonishingly, those people stayed in Australia. PENGUINS - Kairuku grebneffi (Late Oligocene) Penguins are, let’s face it, pretty silly-looking things.  We watch them waddle around in the zoo and laugh at them, while we forget that they also get pretty big - an emperor penguin stands four feet tall.  Kairuku was as much as a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier.  This was a penguin that could kick your ass in a fight or in a diving contest: it could go deeper and faster than any living penguin. BOA CONSTRICTORS - Titanoboa cerrejonensis (Paleocene) Snakes swallow their dinners whole - a good-sized boa can swallow a sheep.  This snake could have swallowed a goddamn hippo.  It probably got to be fifty feet long, weighed between two and three thousand pounds, and was so big around that you couldn’t have given it a hug - although it certainly could have given you one.  I have no idea what it ate, and I suspect that nobody else does, either. DRAGONFLIES - Meganeura brongniarti (Late Carboniferous) At the same time as Arthropleura were rustling through the undergrowth on god knows how many legs, Meganeura was flitting around above the prehistoric swamps.  If your car hit one of these on the highway, the results would be much more dramatic than a splat on the windshield.  With a wingspan of over two feet it was the largest flying insect ever, and probably ate things like fish and amphibians as well as other insects. ORANGUTANS - Gigantopithecus blacki (Pleistocene) Orangutans are already big enough to beat the shit out of you if they want to.  If Gigantopithecus stood on its hind legs it would have been almost ten feet tall, and most likely weighed in at around twelve hundred pounds.  This animal could have tossed you around like the Hulk beating Loki-shaped dents in the floor of Stark Tower.  Some people have suggested that it still roams the isolated woods of the world and is occasionally reported as bigfoot, in which case I humbly suggest we leave it the fuck alone.

Part of being aromantic, at least for me, is always being the third wheel. Feeling awkward and left out whenever my friends leave to go on a date or whatever and I have no one to hang out with. I'm not saying that I want to intrude on someone's date or whatever, they deserve to have time to themselves. I get that. I just wish I didn't feel so alone when everyone around me has someone special to them and I don't.

And it's not like I want to be in a partnered relationship, either. I actually feel pretty squicked about the concept of being the recipient of romantic feelings, and I feel completely neutral about having a qpr (aside from the knowledge that I don't feel any sort of attraction and don't particularly want to have to make personal decisions only with the help of someone else).

I guess it just makes me feel a little like I'm not anyone's most loved, if that makes any sense. No one loves me more than anyone else. I'm nobody's best friend, nobody's dearest individual. And partly that's freeing, because I don't have to figure anyone else into my future, but it's also sad, too, because I'm nobody's favorite and I'll always have to take a backseat to other people.

Ugh, idk. I shouldn't be complaining. I have great friends who I love dearly and who care about me. I just have to constantly be aware that I'm never going to be the first one someone thinks of when they think of home.

Hey just so you all know, the Prehistoric Planet Uncovered bonus episodes are actually being put up on the Apple TV official YouTube channel!

While it is really preferred that you do not pirate this series, if you absolutely have to for whatever reason, PLEASE watch the uncovered episodes on the official YouTube channel to show your support. These mini episodes are only around 5 minutes each and they really give a fascinating insight into all the science and research put into the show.

If we want more accurate dinosaur media where the dinosaurs actually behave like living animals, we need to show as much support as we can no matter how small.

[Edit: Updated to include all 5 Uncovered episodes]

MY FELLOW AROMANTIC SIMMERS I AM LOSING MY MIND

so the latest update to the sims 4 added sexuality customization. i was like “oh cool we can probably, like, make gay sims now instead of having everyone be bi. cool. good for the gays.”

I dared not HOPE that they would even think about aros but DUDE. THEY ADDED THE SPLIT ATTRACTION MODEL

YOU CAN NOW MAKE SIMS THAT ARE ARO, ACE, OR OTHERWISE HAVE SPLIT ATTRACTIONS VIA THE NEW SEXUALITY TAB IN THE CREATE A SIM (its under the same tab as the custom gender options)

[image ID: a small cropped screenshot of a notification from the sims 4, in which a sim says “I am not interested in romantic relationships.” end ID]

NO MORE DO WE HAVE TO SUFFER WITH THE (modded in from sims 3) UNFLIRTY TRAIT. THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER. IT STRAIGHT UP DELETES THE OPTION FOR ROMANTIC INTERACTIONS, BOTH PLAYER MADE AND AUTONOMOUS, FOR THE SIM AND FOR ANY SIMS INTERACTING WITH THEM WHO KNOW THEIR ROMANTIC ORIENTATION.

and!!!!!! then I thought!!!! no! it couldn’t possibly be! this is wonderful but they couldn’t possibly have moved the sexual interactions out of the romance tab, where they’ve always been in every sims game! if you only check the sexual attractions and leave romantic attractions unchecked it probably just like, doesn’t let you do them! they couldn’t possibly!

NOPE

[image ID: a cropped screenshot of the sims 4 showing some interaction options listed under the “friendly” category in the interaction tree. the highlighted interaction is “ask to be WooHoo partners.” end ID]

WOOHOO PARTNERS. FWB. A COMPLETELY NEW RELATIONSHIP TYPE THAT UNLOCKS WOOHOO INTERACTIONS WITHOUT REQUIRING A ROMANTIC RAPPORT LIKE YOU’VE ALWAYS NEEDED IN THE SIMS.

[image ID: a cropped screenshot of the sims 4 showing three different WooHoo options listed under the “friendly” category in the interaction tree. end ID]

LOOK AT IT. IT PUTS THE WOOHOO OPTIONS UNDER THE FRIENDLY TAB.

this is alloaro representation! this is legitimately alloaro representation, with gameplay dedicated to alloaro relationships!

fuck EA and the Sims for their cashgrabbing DLC nonsense and etc but whichever individuals on the dev team are responsible for these features, you have my respect

Some Norse news today: “Runor is a new digital research platform that makes approximately 7,000 runic inscriptions available, as well as reports and images from various databases, institutions and collections.”

You can explore the map without logging in, read transliterations and translations, and also search runic texts.

Check it out: https://app.raa.se/open/runor/search

fat frog wednesday

bonus:

"but you cant possibly [do traditionally romantic stuff] with your friends—"

oh, but i can, because im not a coward.

step up, nerds.

before we became legends / the place both of us began

I was explaining this to a friend recently and I think it's an important distinction to make: not all queerplatonic relationships look the same.

A good way I've found to illustrate what exactly a qpr is, is to say "a qpr is to relationships what nonbinary is to gender". While both of these traditionally function on a binary (male/female, platonic/romantic), by defining our personal outlooks and experiences of the concepts of gender and relationships with new terms, we challenge the boundaries that society has put in place.

And yes, whilst redefining what actually constitutes romantic or platonic relationships, or male and female identities, and what makes them different (and acknowledging where they overlap, or where they can expand past what we traditionally expect) is important to increasing our understanding, so is providing options entirely outside of those two boxes.

And that's what it is - options. It's very easy to trivialise the concept of nonbinary and simply make gender into a trinary, rather than a binary. Male/female/nonbinary, which goes against the very purpose of the nonbinary label. This further erases the spectrum of gender. It's the same with relationships - by giving a strict set of instructions on how a qpr must look and act, you are simply creating a trinary. The point of the concept of qprs is to acknowledge that there are relationships between people that may overlap platonic and romantic, or fall partially within one and partially outside, or ones that are entirely separate from either category.

There are an infinite amount of ways a relationship can manifest, and if the people in the relationship feel that queerplatonic best describes their partnership without romance, or their affection without commitment, or their feelings towards each other that aren't quite what romantic or platonic is to them, or any other reason that rebels against amatonormativity, then they can choose to use that term. Queerplatonic covers the widest range of relationships that come in all shapes and sizes.

I think it's so important when discussing topics like relationships and gender to consciously make the effort to keep queering our ideas of the concepts - to remember that a spectrum is a spectrum. Labels can be useful for finding community, identifying your experiences and validating your struggles, but as soon as you try to start hyper-defining them, you lose the radical nature of queering our understanding of ourselves and our relationships. We name these concepts in order to give a voice to our subversion of society's arbitrary rules and expectations, not to police each other into conforming to a particular understanding of how a person (with a certain label) "should" act or be.