About two months ago, sometime within the hours that shifted February 23rd to the 24th, I had one of those vivid dreams where I'm being super sexy and romantic with an IRL friend and not necessarily a close friend but someone I must be attracted to in some way because I'm having this dream. Have you ever had one of these dreams? Where you wake up and all of a sudden you have a crush on this person, like the intimacy experienced in the dream is so real that it seeps out into IRL space forever changing your perception of this person? Well, it happened to me to an extent where I couldn't ignore my feelings and had to confess my crush to this person, an invitation for intimacy, which was further complicated because this person identifies as a grey asexual and aromantic.

As someone who can go many years without intimate physical contact with another person, I have more than once considered the position of asexuality. And through my adventuring with this specific ace, I'm learning that asexuals occupy a complicated place in the spectrum of sexuality (as well as in relation to queer theory), with differing definitions even within the ace community, and that asexuality does not necessarily equate to a lack of sexuality, which is often pathologized, but, rather, most aces are simply not motivated or interested in "sex" or "romance" at all. And regarding this particular ace, on the rare occasion they are sexual, they only enjoy heavily mediated situations. So our intra-actions and intimate play takes place on platforms such as Avakin Life, an avatar VR app, or WoW (World of Warcraft), or through language and role-playing via emails and texts. And to further complicate this, we often role-play games around violence that mess with the psychological parameters of intimacy and games that seek to destroy the systems that inform us as subjects, including asexuality and aromanticism and notions of real and fantasy.

This has led us to games that merge IG (In Game) space with IRL space, maintaining that IG space is just as real as IRL space, in an attempt to break the systems that keep us locked in a 5% reality. And this play has been quite violent at times, resulting in at least one public killing of a subject, a death of self, yet within an infinite labyrinth, a type of Procedural Death Labyrinth, where we seek to kill each other over and over again in order to facilitate an expansion beyond the 5%. And this is then further complicated by how my adventuring with this ace violates and complicates my relationship with laub, a relationship also committed to death of self, merging, and expanding beyond the 5%. There is a lot here to adventure within so you'll just have to listen to the show!