Why I Don’t Do Crossposts with This Blog

During my years as a blogger, I’ve written posts for other blogs in addition to this blog, yet I’ve never, ever cross-posted. Sometimes, cross-posting is not an option – for example, my agreement with Hacking Chinese was that anything I wrote which was published there would not be published elsewhere unless the Hacking Chinese website permanently shut down or became paywalled.

But even if I had the option of crossposting my contributions to Hacking Chinese to this blog, I wouldn’t do it (unless it was the only way to make those posts available on the internet).

Most of the contributors to the The Asexual Agenda (TAA) who also have independent blogs crosspost most (or all) of their contributions to TAA to their personal blogs as well. I’m the glaring exception.

Why?

Some Quick Comments on Aro Reading for Aro-Spectrum Awareness Week

This is Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!

For the purpose of promoting awareness, I’m going to throw out a few reading suggestions. This isn’t a carefully considered list; it’s me casually throwing around ideas in celebration of the week:

1. About a year ago I read Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman, which features an aro-ace protagonist. I’ve already forgotten the details of the book, but I really liking it much more than I expected. I can recommend it to people who want a novel with an aro-ace protagonist.

2. Read some essays by aro-spec people about being aro. I plan to read interviews featured at AUREA right now in a couple days.

3. Read something from a very different culture and/or time period about romance, fiction or nonfiction. Even though I already intellectually understand that interpretation of romance is to a large extent culturally-constructed, actually seeing how it is differently constructed reminds me of this at a deeper level. And understanding, on a deeper level, how much understanding of romance is dependent on culture reminds me not to take our cultural ideals of romance too seriously. On the other hand, I also sometimes find that the understanding of romance in a very different culture/time period can also be very similar to how our current culture understands romance, which might lead me to think that trying to change our culture may be futile, so no guarantees! One suggestion to this effect: “Symposium” by Plato (the original source of the concept of ‘Platonic love’) (And I want to make it clear that I personally disagree with a lot of the ideas in “Symposium”)

I could try to come up with some more quick suggestions, but instead I think I’ll get started on reading some of those interviews posted at AUREA.

Have a happy Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!

Remembering Jiaming Lake and the Southern Cross-Island Highway (Part 4)

This is a photo taken on the Southern Cross-Island Highway – I’m guessing that’s the Xinwulu river

Continued from Part 3.

When I wrote the emails in 2013 about my trip on the Southern Cross-Island Highway, I promised at the end that I would an email about Wulu Gorge, which I never did. Thus, unlike the previous parts of this blog post series, this entire post was written in 2020. And instead of being able to copy and paste a bunch of text I wrote shortly after the trip, all I have to rely on are a few photos and memories which are more than six years old.

Remembering Jiaming Lake and the Southern Cross-Island Highway (Part 3)

A little after sunrise, with one of my companions in the lower left part of the picture.

Continued from Part 2

Actually, hiking at 3:30 in the morning wasn’t as bad as I expected, and it meant that we got out of the forest right around sunrise, which was nice, and that we had plenty of daylight in the part of the trail with the best views.

We hiked up Xiangyangshan and then … well, there are two trails to Xiangyangshan. The recommended route is the western trail for both the ascent and descent, so I assumed that we would only use the western trail. Well, they headed off onto the eastern trail, and I figured that joining them on the worse trail would still be safer than going alone on the better trail.

In fact the eastern trail was … not as bad as I expected. Sure, it’s in worse condition than the western trail, but it has different views, and actually isn’t any worse than some of the trails around Taipei. In fact, I’m grateful that they decided to do the eastern trail, because I probably would not have dared on my own.

There are two of my hiking companions