Thanks :) !

What software are you using? Is this some kind of jellyfin plugin so your users can request movies? 👀

Yeah I know. As an Ace person, the conflation of normality, happiness and sex is really tiresome at times. Norms surrounding sexual relations can be quite asphyxiating. Casual acephobia is really to be found everywhere, and even though I never felt in any way in physical danger because of my identity the way other parts of the LGBT accronym can be, I definitely felt the alienation.

However at the end of the day, you have every right to push back against those kind of demands, and call them out for what they are. If I’m honest that’s the other part of why labels are useful for me: as a political tool to push back and assert that the way I chose to live my life is legitimate.

Edit: Even if you end up choosing not to use the label, you can still point out that ace people exist and that universalizing norms around sex is pretty acephobic in itself. Everyone should be able to voice their experience without feeling dismissed.

I would say that what you describe falls in the spectrum, but no one can decide whether you’re asexual but yourself. As pointed out, a label is just a tool to better understand yourself and find people that somewhat can relate to your experience.

Asexual people can experience libido (sex-drive) or not, aesthetic attraction, can masturbate or not, engage in sexual activities for a number of reasons (feeling close to someone, pleasing someone, etc.), etc.

What really helped me was to listen to other ace people experiences. You can find a bunch of resources online, for a starter I really like the “free from desire” podcast, which touch on a number of the things you describe in your post.

Best of luck in your self-introspection, whether or not you decide that the label is for you you’ll have come out the other way with a better understanding of yourself :) .

Also take care, do not put too much pressure on yourself, and please don’t let other define your relationship to your sexuality for you.

I think your answer quite strongly essentialize gender norms.

Everyone crave intimacy in their own way, whether a man, woman, enby, allo or ace, aro or not. Similarly, men and women have a quite similar sex drive according to most studies (meaning that you find quite the same range: some people just have a high sex drive while other have a lower one, regardless of gender). Hormones do somewhat play a role in it apparently, but quite frankly sex drive is the result of very complex interactions in your body, is affected by your psychological state of mind, etc. In any way, it really can’t be tied down to a simple testosterone vs. eustrogen debate.

What gender exactly is (a construct, a performance?) is still up for debate in the social sciences, however, all scholars do agree that different expectations exists regarding sexual behavior for men and women. Those expectations both contribute to shape your identity and influence the way you act, through to norms enforcement mechanisms.

Where I’m going with that is that most women have strongly internalized the “dangers” of casual sex (slut-shaming, as well as putting yourself physically at risk of aggression), while men have internalized different norms (social valorisation put on number and diversity of sexual “conquests”). All of this have very little to do with sexual preferences, or asexuality in general.

I also do think that the last part of your answer play on aphobic tropes (health issue or trauma). Not accusing you of anything, just pointing out that it might be read as insensitive. In general I really don’t think anything’s wrong with OP, whether they are asexual or not. They do not seem to express distress tied to their situation, only annoyance at how other people perceive this as “an issue”.

For pdf export, you can just org-export-to-pdf. In the background it translates your doc to a latex file and then compiles that (I know you stated you didn’t lile tex, but in case you can bear a few command this is actually super useful as it gives you more control over the doc, you can just insert random latex part in your doc and it will handle them nicely). Same for publishers. You can just translate your file to tex and that will fit most of the publication processes. Otherwise you can just convert your doc to pretty much anything with pandoc (including .docx).

Keep in mind however that this is basically just saying: I like the idea of latex (fine granularity at compile time, raw text and reproducibility) but I prefer org markup for common marks like headers, bold and refs, and I like having a somewhat pretty editor. If your issue with latex is that writting and formating are not synchronous, than yeah this is not for you.

Depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re deadset on wysiwyg editors, then yeah, onlyoffice is as good as it gets if you want to keep it foss and don’t like libreoffice. Otherwise people seem to like the many scientific markdown editors. But honestly if you already know emacs then just… emacs. I’m in academia too and with the right set of packages it can fit an academic workflow pretty nicely. I write in org mode with org-superstar, olivetti mode to center text in org, varying fonts and font size for headers, citar for references (that syncs with a realtime bibtex export from my zotero library). With the added bonus of having all the usual goodness (magit, projectile, you name it).

It’s spelled the same way but not pronounced the same way. Chat - the animal - is pronounced “sha” and Chat - the dialogue - is pronounced the english way (tchat). It’s been used to refer to internet chat rooms since the 90s, the same way that a lot of english linguo is commonly used here to refer to web-related concepts

Edit: the GPT part however, is indeed very funny

This is one of the worst case of tech dude tries to solve social sciences with math I’ve ever read. The paper is not just bad as a whole, it deliberately disregard 200 years of research in at least 3 different academic fields and instead quotes Borat.
And then goes on to gleefully describe how the authors made a giant machine to reproduce their own (dangerous) biases about the universality of emotion-voicing with just chat-GPT and a zero-shot classifier, would you look at that? Yay science I guess?

The proposal explicitly goes against “more fingerprinting”, which is maybe the one area where they are honest. So I do think that it’s not about more data collection, at least not directly. The token is generated locally on the user’s machine and it’s supposedly the only thing that need to be shared. So the website’s vendor do get potentially some infos (in effect: that you pass the test used to verify your client), but I don’t think that it’s the major point.
What you’re describing is the status quo today. Websites try to run invasive scripts to get as much info about you as they can, and if you try to derail that, they deem that you aren’t human, and they throw you a captcha.
Right now though, you can absolutely configure your browser to lie at every step about who you are.
I think that the proposal has much less to do with direct data collection (there’s better way to do that) than it has to do with control over the content-delivery chain.
If google gets its way, it would effectively switch control over how you access the web from you to them. This enables all the stuff that people have been talking about in the comment: the end of edge case browser and operating systems, the prevention of add blocking (and with it indeed, the extension of data collection), the consolidation of chrome’s dominant position, etc.

Yeah, moreover you give server admins the illusion that they CAN control what happens client side, which is bonkers.
Honestly the most infuriating thing in this whole controversy is that the proposed approach fix almost none of the issues that the authors say their proposal should fix.
What it does however is break the open web principles in major ways.

As other have pointed out, it goes way beyond ad-blocking. It’s a complete reversal of the trust model, and is basically DRM for your OS:
Right now, websites assume rightfully that clients can’t be trusted. Any security measure happens on the server side, with the rationale that the user has control over the client and you as a dev control the server. If your security is worth two cents, you secure server side. This change propose to extend vendor power, by defining a set of rule about what they deem acceptable as a client app, and enforcing it through a token system. It gives way too much power to the vendor, who gets to dictate what you can do on your machine.
We actually have a live experience of how that could go down with safetynet on android. Instead of doubling down on the biggest security issue there (OEM that refuses to support their software for more than 1 or 2 year after release which, quite frankly, should be universally considered as unacceptable), google decided that OEMs should be allowed way more trust than the user. Therefore modifying your own OS in any way, even if it’s ripe with security flaws to begin with and you’re just trying to fix that, breaks safetynet. If you break safetynet, “critical apps” like banking apps stop working altogether.
The worst part is that there are ways to circonvent safetynet breakage, because in the end, if DRM taught us anything, it is that if you control the client and know your way around, with enough work you can do pretty much anything you want with it. So bad actors are certainly not kept at bay, you just unjustly annoy people with legitmate usecases or even just experimenting with their hardware because in the end, you consider that your user are at best dumb security flaws, at worst huge cash machine, often both at the same time.