Things are changing around here...

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the new and improved Ace Couple podcast. My name is Courtney. I am here, as always, with my spouse, Royce. And today’s probably going to be a super short, breezy episode, but we’ve got some ch-ch-changes going on. Oh my gosh, the look Royce just gave me when I said — did you really expect me not [laughing] to say that?

Royce: I didn’t realize when we were starting the podcast episode there’d also be changes to the intro.

Courtney: Oh yeah, we’re changing everything. Forget everything you ever knew about the Ace Couple Podcast. That’s very inaccurate. A lot of these changes are very mild. We’ll talk about the reasons behind some of them.

Courtney: But first and foremost, if you already clicked on this, you have probably already noticed we have a brand new, beautiful logo. If you’re listening to this on YouTube, you may have even seen our fabulous new accompanying banner. These were designed by the very talented Emmalee Larghi Dahlgren. And Emmalee also, just last year, designed the Disabled Ace Day logo for us.

Courtney: We are so thrilled to have had Emmalee’s help in this because, as we have covered on more than one occasion, Courtney’s patience for graphic design does not exist, so we keep things very low effort around here. Low time commitment, low effort: this is truly the way. So, it was quite nice to have someone who actually knows what they’re doing make something lovely for us. So, I hope you all love it as much as we do. As with everything, it’ll take a little time to get used to, but it is much more professionally done than Courtney just saying, “Well, there is an Asexual pride flag. There are already built-in colors. Quick, slap words on it. Good to go,” on Canva, without measuring anything.

Courtney: But with rolling out this beautiful new logo, rolling out our new branding, so to speak, we’ve got a few other things that are changing, or have been slowly changing over time, so we just want to go through them all one by one here and address them to keep you all in the loop.

Courtney: And, like, not that this is going to affect our listeners’ experience at all, but I thought some of it was kind of interesting. Royce, can you tell us a little bit about… Because we have a new hosting platform now, correct? And there were a series of reasons behind that.

Royce: This could absolutely affect some listeners’ experience to some degree. Hopefully not.

Courtney: Oh, is it? Oh.

Royce: So —

Courtney: Very valuable information then.

Royce: For the past… what has it been now? Almost three years? Over two and a half years? — our podcast has been self-hosted. And that has been nice for some reasons and a little bit more work for some others. But we got a little surprise one day not too long ago, when we woke up to find an email that the hosting platform that has all of our audio files just surprise banned our account with no warning.

Courtney: It was during Pride Month, too. It was horrendously acephobic.

Royce: If you noticed a period of time — I don’t believe it ended up lasting more than a few hours — where some episodes were just not available everywhere except for YouTube, because YouTube hosts and stores and maintains its own videos, that’s why. That’s what happened.

Royce: And in those few hours trying to figure out what was going on and researching alternatives, we ended up deciding that it was time to move to an actual podcast platform. We had had enough viewers at that point in time that it would make sense to have someone else [laughing] hold on to the episodes. And it would make it a lot easier to turn on automated ads, like we did on YouTube a while back, which has just helped with the cost and production of everything.

Courtney: Right. Because switching over to this hosting platform is costing us more money than just doing it on our own.

Royce: Yeah, we basically weren’t paying anything for just doing it on our own — virtually. We fit under the free tiers. But that was — another thing is, thus far, for the past almost three years, we fit under that free usage amount due to aspects of the platform, even though we were getting a fair amount of traffic. Which is probably why we got picked up and flagged by some sort of automated malicious account thing that was going on. I sent an email to the company and they got back to me within a few hours — I think it was three or four hours — being like, “Sorry, you got picked up in an automated sweep of bad actors.” And —

Courtney: What can I say? We are too popular. It is suspicious. [laughs] Which, yeah, I mean, most people don’t host podcasts that way. But at this point, dare I say, we are actually a real podcast now. [laughs]

Royce: It was kind of surprising to me. When we first started this, it didn’t seem like hosting your own podcast would be that big of a deal. And if you know a thing or two, it really isn’t that complicated. You just need to put the files somewhere and then put up something to help cache them, and with a little bit of, like, domain or IT knowledge, it’s not that big of a deal.

Royce: But when I was searching “How to self-host a podcast,” all I was finding was articles titled, “Why you shouldn’t self-host a podcast.” It was kind of funny.

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: Not helpful. I also found that a lot of “How to get your podcast started” have outdated information on how you should encode your audio, how you should get your RSS feed started, so I think the whole situation is a bit outdated.

Royce: But anyway, we have, at this point, moved over to Podbean as a host. They seemed to fit what we were trying to do well enough, affordably enough. Changes on our website have reflected that. We are still having the old hosting site up for the time being because there’s still a tiny bit of traffic trailing in on it, but we’ll eventually switch that entirely over.

Royce: The reason why some people might be affected is, I assume there won’t be any performance issues, because this is a pretty big podcast-devoted hosting service, but we have turned on ads. I don’t believe they have actually started yet, but that will happen at some point in the future for our non-YouTube listeners.

Courtney: Yes. Which, YouTube, we did already turn ads on, because we had a lovely little surprise accidentally going viral at one point. [laughs]

Royce: Luckily, we turned ads on, like, a month or two before that. [laughs]

Courtney: But, yeah, look at us being a whole real podcast at this point. Like you said, we’re almost going to be coming up on our third year here in a couple of months. In that time, we have charted in 58 different countries, which is just mind-boggling. I mean, thank you so much to all of you listeners. I don’t know where most of you are coming from.

Courtney: But then, what did you find recently? I don’t even know if you told me outright how that resolved. But what was going on with, like, our censored words on one of the platforms?

Royce: Oh, something stupid. I feel like I can’t use a service — like, a programming service — without immediately finding something I hate about it.

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: So, I mentioned, like, there are pros and cons to self-hosting your podcast. There are some things that we were able to do that were a little more modern than the industry as a whole, because I was doing it myself. Moving over has some pros and cons. We thought that it was the better decision overall. But when we were importing our existing podcast, for some reason, this platform censored and stripped out words that it didn’t like.

Courtney: Right. Didn’t it, like, censor the word “queer”?

Royce: It censored “queer” and “sexual,” but not “Asexual,” because the whatever filter it was probably doesn’t know what that means. But it censored “queer.” It censored “sexual.” It censored a couple of other things. It just straight up didn’t upload the “boobs” episode. I had to —

Courtney: What?! My boobs? No! Respect them!

Royce: I had to upload that myself.

Courtney: No respect for my boobs.

Royce: And another irritating aspect of that is that every episode that imported correctly, it kept the unique identifier of that episode. But anything that I had to manually update, like that one episode that got blocked and a handful during the transition time, I can’t manually set that ID. So we basically, like, lost some amount of analytics around those episodes because they got replaced with an identical episode with a different unique identifier. Just little things that should work that didn’t work.

Courtney: So, basically, we are now so popular that we are perceived as a threat and we are being silenced…

Royce: The thing is, is —

Royce: Courney: …by Big Podcast. [laughs]

Royce: When we’re entering episodes week to week, there isn’t a filter like that. There was no issue with me uploading the “boobs” episode manually. But for some reason, in the automated upload, it took out a bunch of stuff. So I manually went through and fixed, hopefully, all of the corrections where it just stripped a word out of the title or description of an episode. Maybe I missed one or two, but I tried to fix those.

Courtney: So you’re really just saying that my boobs are too much to take all at once and best consumed in small increments? It’s what the podcast platform has deemed, yes?

Royce: Did you get all the jokes out about that episode? Do you have one more?

Courtney: [laughing] Do you want me to come up with another one? No, I’m running on empty here. I just distinctly remember, like, fretting over what to even name that episode and being like, “Oh, what are we going to name this?” and trying to come up with something clever and something that sounds like a social observation and something important. And then I realized, like, three hours had gone by and I still haven’t figured out what to name this thing. So I was like, “Screw it. ‘boobs.’” And we’re due for a “boobs” part two. So if the new podcast platform has an issue with my boobs, we’re gonna need to figure that out real soon.

Courtney: So another change, which many of you in the know already know about, but may come as news to those of you who weren’t as actively involved in sort of the community outside of just listening to the podcast: ACAR has been retired — Aspecs Committed to Anti-Racism. I wanted to mention that on the podcast just because we did an episode introducing the concept of ACAR, so some of you may have listened to that episode, some of you may have heard us reference it in the past.

Courtney: And there are a lot of reasons why ACAR was becoming increasingly unsustainable, and I’m certainly not going to go into all of those now. But for those of you who have utilized and shared our Gaza Action Doc — our… I believe the full title is Actionable Ways to Support the Palestinians of Gaza, hosted via Box, because for some reason, it was getting flagged on other systems we tried to make that document on — boy, we’re just being censored left and right — that document is still going to remain active. It is still going to be available. So, we are still going to continue linking that in the show notes of all of our episodes. Please continue to visit it and revisit it whenever you have time to. There are lots of great things there: educational resources, but, more specifically, ways to write legislators, protests you can attend, places you can donate.

Courtney: And even though it has ended, there are a lot of great things that I think we were able to accomplish while the group was running. There are some things that I am very proud of. In addition to the Gaza Action Doc, we organized and hosted the live Zoom event last Ace Week. That was our Disabled BIPOC Aces panel. Some of you may have also listened to it here on the podcast, because we did record that live event and publish the audio later. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please go do. We had fabulous panelists. And, you know, that… Actually, I’m really glad that we did that, and it was very well-organized and we had volunteers helping us organize it.

Courtney: One thing we haven’t mentioned on the podcast yet, even though we’ve talked about our pets in the past, is that over the last couple years, we have had a bit of a turnover in some of our pets. Unfortunately, last September, we lost Quigley, our chihuahua. And it was literally the day he died that we had our first, like, organizing meeting planned for that. So, that was very sad. I showed up and I was, like, crying, and I’m like, “Sorry, everyone, I’m very emotional, but we’ve had this planned for a while now and I really want to get this rolling,” while meanwhile, Royce is literally in the backyard, like, digging a hole.

Courtney: So that… There were many times where I was dedicating a lot of time to ACAR when I probably should have been focusing on other things. And sometimes that’s personal, emotional things like that. Other times it’s like, what is just the best use of my time? There were some instances where… For example, with the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza, I felt like I was, you know, wrangling people to have discussions and trying to get people organized for several hours, when what I should have been doing was going out to a protest, being more involved in the local organizing efforts. So it is always a balancing act. But, on a personal note, that is an observation I made, and something that I think any organizer within the community should very heavily consider if you find yourself in a similar situation in the future.

Courtney: But, despite that really sad initial organizing day, I’m really thrilled with how that panel ended up turning out. We also, during Ace Week, created a disabled Ace media and resources list that was published on Asexual Outreach’s website. I will link to that, and everything else I’m talking about that has a link that you can still go to will be in the show notes. You know the drill. But on that media list, you can also see Emmalee’s Disabled Ace Day logo that was created for us.

Courtney: But we also just did quite a bit of days getting together to try to organize — like, writing Ace Week proclamations, writing Aro Week proclamations. Just sort of take some of the tedium away from that when you have a dedicated group of people who are, you know, getting together and making an event of it, and then can also take away some of the disappointment when maybe your state doesn’t agree to write a proclamation but someone else in your organizing group got their state to, so you can sort of share in everyone’s success. And so that was quite nice.

Courtney: And then, of course, a lot of you already know about the instance with Yilin, with the British Museum stealing her translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry. We’ve had Yilin on the podcast. We have talked about that. ACAR did a lot during that period of time: having organizing nights, getting together to reach out to the museum itself, the Board of Directors. We put a document together for ways to help Yilin during that time.

Courtney: And I think there was a period of time where a lot of Aspecs in the community just really benefited from being able to meet each other and network and work together on their own projects. I want to put a link because I thought this was a fabulous article by Ryan Cotter called “The Abundance of a Mixed Asexual Life” that was published on JoySauce. And I know that there was a lot of networking between even the BIPOC members of the community. We sort of started with a focus of focusing on anti-racism education for the white members of our community to do better, but we did have a lot of BIPOC members also come in and start to meet each other and talk about issues without the community. And some of those conversations were really, really valuable. And even just having sort of town hall meetings to get together and discuss what the issues are in the community and what we’re seeing and try to brainstorm what we can do together to improve the community going forward.

Courtney: So we did do a lot of very good things. It was very bittersweet to have to formally retire the server, but I did want to let everyone know in case anybody’s going through the backlog and find an old episode where we’re mentioning ACAR. If you’re trying to find that server, it is not going to be there.

Courtney: And another challenge I had and have personally is just being online. [laughs] So, some of you may have noticed that we haven’t really been as active on social media for probably this entire year so far, and I’m here to say that is probably not going to change. I am making an active decision not to be on social media. There’s also a lot of reasons for that. You know, the little sort of bigoted comments you get from people truly don’t bother me all that much, so that isn’t even the reason.

Courtney: Sometimes it’s other people in the community. If we get harassment from Aces, harassment from other people, and… Unfortunate to say, as well — I mean, we need to continue the discussion of racism within the community, even if ACAR isn’t the vessel for discussing that anymore — because I’ve experienced plenty of racism in the community, and even more once I started talking about racism. It’s like, you talk about it and then people push back even harder. So there are members of the broader Aspec community who weren’t very pleased with ACAR who have started long-term harassment campaigns. And that is a lot, and doesn’t make me want to be online. When I’m logging in and there are subtweets from other accounts, there are people tagging us, talking directly to us, people trying to DM us. We’ve had some people so persistent where we’ll try to have a conversation at first — “Alright, if you have an issue with us, let’s talk” — and some folks are just not interested in talking. They outright refuse to talk. They just want to rage on social media.

Courtney: And so I think we’ve only actually had to block, like, two people who identify as Aspec. I tried so hard not to block even people who had issues with us. But when it becomes a consistent pattern of harassment on social media, there were a couple of people that we did end up having to block, and… Only for them to try to find us other places. Then we’d start getting hateful emails from them. We’d start getting hateful YouTube comments from them. We’d get hateful one-star reviews from them multiple times. And it’s just not fun.

Courtney: We tried to set up a Tumblr. I think we announced on the podcast once, “Let’s try this Tumblr thing. People are trying to convince us to get on Tumblr.” And within a couple days of starting the Tumblr, we’re getting hateful, anonymous Tumblr DMs from some of the exact same people that have been harassing us for a couple of years. So it’s just — it’s not fun. I don’t like it. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth my energy. I have better things I need to be doing.

Courtney: And I’m not, like, fully, fully ready to talk about this yet. I’m sure in the future, you’ll all get a much more thorough storytime about this. But I do, legitimately, genuinely, in my real life, have a long-term stalker — over a decade long, someone I know in real life — where these stalking behaviors happened, honestly, before I even met you, Royce. Like, our entire marriage, you have seen the progression of this person who was stalking me before we even met. And so I do have this level of paranoia around anonymous accounts, people whose names I don’t know, people whose faces I can’t see, people who consistently try to find me on multiple different platforms, who try to contact me, who try to get access to me in different ways. That is stalking behavior. And even if that, like, little online harassment hasn’t developed into a fully-blown stalking situation yet, it’s very reminiscent of very serious, dangerous things that I have been dealing with in my life for a long time. So it is not okay. Don’t do that to people.

Courtney: I’m not the only one in our community who has had people do that. I know Yasmin Benoit has talked a little bit publicly about this. We’ve also talked privately about this. Some people do exhibit stalking behaviors in our community. And it’s often the women of color who are being stalked in the community, too. So, important to keep in mind. So, just general online behaviors of people are not healthy for me to be around very often.

Courtney: But, even past that, like, I don’t want to know, like, who Brianna Wu is. Since starting the podcast and joining Twitter, I now know who Brianna Wu is because she blocked us, and she blocked us because she came into our little corner of Twitter as someone who — I didn’t know anything about Gamergate. I did not know anything about her online persona or any of her projects. I knew nothing about this person at all, except in her bio, at the time, she was running for office. She was a politician to me. A politician coming, saying, “I want to be an ally to Asexual people. Tell me, like, what rights are you fighting for? What are the issues?”

Courtney: And so here I was like, “Wow! A politician asking. So, yes, here’s all of our resources. Here are articles. Here are studies. Here are our concerns.” Only for her to not read or care about them at all and for her to say, like, “Yeah, that’s not actually a political problem, though. What else you got?” And so it’s like, alright, well, if the studies and the numbers… if these articles aren’t doing it, I was like, “Alright, let me talk to you as a human. Here are some of my personal experiences. Only for then to her, like, block us and then start tweeting about, like, “OMG, when you have a large account like me, people don’t even see you as a human and they just start trauma dumping all over you. You’re just a vessel to trauma dump.” It’s like, you asked me! [laughs] You came to me and you asked! And also, now you’re saying that my personal experiences as an Asexual are traumatic, if I’m trauma dumping on you, but that’s still not a problem, that’s still not a concern for you as a poli-? Okay. Alright.

Courtney: So, I don’t like that I know who Brianna Wu is because we had that interaction. I really… in theory, she means nothing to my life, I could have never logged onto Twitter and never had that interaction, and I would have been none the wiser. So… And even like — dare I say his name — James Somerton. We wouldn’t have known who James Somerton was if we didn’t start our Twitter account. We wouldn’t have been scammed out of $1,500 if we didn’t know who James Somerton was.

Courtney: And, like, don’t get me wrong: we would go out of our way to try to help members of our community. We try to donate to Ko-fis, we try to donate to GoFundMes and different fundraisers, because we want to, like, help our own, and we have a little bit of expendable income to do that. But then when it starts getting into, like, “Oh, I’m making these movies, I’m trying to put out this representation,” and now all of a sudden, we’re talking about a substantial amount of money that now we have just been scammed out of because we were too trusting of people online.

Courtney: So, not being online will probably save us a little bit of sanity, it will probably save us a lot of time, it will probably save us a lot of money. And also, like, we even tried maybe different platforms. We did get onto BlueSky. A member of our community very graciously gave us a key for that. And I know it’s still not super robust. There aren’t a lot of people on there, especially when you compare it to Twitter, Tumblr. But we tried that for a bit. We tried using it more or less the same way we were using Twitter. But then, once enough people start knowing about you, and when we talk so much about commentary and our opinions and our views on things, people start demanding your opinion on weird things.

Royce: As if a big, known account can just be called in to be the online arbiter of arguments.

Courtney: Oh, that absolutely happened, too. Yeah!

Royce: It’s because you got a gavel.

Courtney: I should have never gotten that gavel. Now I am the judge, jury, and executioner, because a gavel hath been bequeathed to me. I actually have two gavels. That’s the problem. I have too many gavels. This is too much power. Too much power has been given to little old me.

Royce: I just thought of you dual wielding gavels.

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: And a D&D character concept came to mind.

Courtney: Oh no. Well, we’re gonna have to explore that later, huh? So, yeah, there would be some instances where, like, two random accounts are fighting about something. Pick any given topic. And if it’s vaguely related to Asexuality, then people would be like, [claps] “The Ace Couple, tagging you in. Go tell them.” And it’s like, uhhh…

Royce: “But I don’t wanna.”

Courtney: I don’t wanna! And I didn’t mind that so much when it was situations like a really big account is like genuinely asking questions. Like, if someone asks, “Oh, how are Aces subject to conversion therapy?” And it’s actually like a big account, lots of eyes on it, and someone who doesn’t know as much about it as us is like, “The Ace Couple knows a lot about this,” I didn’t mind that so much. But, like, two accounts, each have, like, 200 followers each, and they’re arguing about something in fandom, and then someone’s like, “The Ace Couple, go get them.” [laughs and stammers in rage] No. No, thank you.

Courtney: But some of the things, too. Like, I get that we talk about representation in media a lot, so it’s a little normal for someone to be like, “Hey, there’s this new Ace character in media. Like, The Ace Couple, what’s your opinion?” Because that’s a thing we do talk about a lot. But, like, I started getting — and not only just one person on one platform, but multiple people over the last, like, I don’t know, eight months maybe have either come into our YouTube comments or tagged us into a conversation or tried to DM us something on either Tumblr, asking what our opinions are on pedophiles. And, like, they ask in different ways. Sometimes, someone will literally just be like, “Oh, what’s your opinion on pedophiles?” And it’s like, who are you? Why are you asking?

Royce: That is such an odd question to get out of the blue. You know it’s some kind of trap question.

Courtney: It’s a trap. And sometimes, it has been out of the blue — like, on a YouTube comment, just, “What’s your opinion on pedophiles?” And then it’s like, well, you could literally be anybody. But sometimes, it’s on social media, and you actually get, like, more context behind the conversation and why people are asking. And then there will be people asking, like, “Oh, well, you know, a pedophile who is attracted to kids but would never, ever, ever act on it and would never, ever actually do anything to hurt them, and they can’t actually help it because that’s just the way they are.” Then they’d be like, “In that situation, The Ace Couple, I’m almost afraid to ask you this, but I need to know your opinion!”

Courtney: And it’s like, can we not ask the woman who was sexually assaulted by multiple people in multiple different contexts as a child what her opinion is on pedophiles? Can we… can we not? Like, I know there’s nuance to that discussion, as there is nuance to all discussions, but, like, why do you have to ask me that? Why… You don’t have to ask me that, actually, and I don’t have to have that conversation with you.

Courtney: So where do we go from here? If you try to contact us via social media, you will not get a response. It is not going to happen. There is… I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I don’t think we’re fully deleting the accounts. I think they’re just gonna hang out for a while. But, I mean, who knows, in a couple months from now, don’t be surprised if they disappear. I might just feel a little feisty one day and just nuke it all. Who knows? Anything is possible.

Courtney: In terms of… So, let’s address emails, because we also get a lot of those, and there are some periods of time where we get a lot more than other periods of time. I personally am very bad at responding to large waves of emails. And, I promise you, if you have ever emailed us — and I mean ever, within the last three years — and not gotten a reply from me, I promise you you are taking up space in my brain. Every single day, I’m going through my mental list of thousands of emails that I never responded to that I meant to. And that is not a joke. We had a Swedish listener send me an email in Swedish, I think within the first few months of our podcast. And it was the sweetest thing. I was super happy. It was a wonderful conversation. And I was like, I can’t wait to respond to this. And then I got overwhelmed with other emails, emails in different inboxes. Social media was another reason for the overwhelm. And I still, every day, tell myself I need to respond to that email. And then I remember that email is three years old and it would be weird to respond to it at this point, but I’m just gonna think about it every day. Every single day of my waking life is just a running tabulation of all the emails I never responded to.

Courtney: So anybody out there who has not ever gotten a response, it is not personal. It is neurotic. [laughs] That said, there are still emails I tell myself I’m going to respond to, so you still might get a response someday. You never know. But not going to be the best way to contact me if you ever, like, want a response, because that’s not going to be guaranteed. I cannot promise that.

Courtney: That said, the really quick little things — we’ve had very helpful people that we appreciate a lot, people who would email, telling us, like, a word got censored. Like, “The word ‘queer’ isn’t showing up on your podcast.” We didn’t know that until someone sent us an email real quick. Super appreciate you for pointing that out. Just little things like that, where someone’s like, “Hey, don’t know if you know this, but…” Those are super fair game. Thank you. We appreciate you.

Courtney: If you’re wanting to ask us to speak, if you are wanting to ask us to write or otherwise get involved in other sort of community-oriented things, those are things I am happy to consider. In fact, this Pride Month, I was a speaker at our Kansas City Youth Pride event, and that was fantastic. That was a wonderful event. I was really, really happy to be the speaker at that event, provide some real life Ace representation to queer youth and their family. So inquiries like that: very happy to take.

Courtney: That said, if you want to ask us questions, if you want to tell us your personal story or personal experiences, things like that: honestly, at this point, probably, one of the better ways is just by snail mail. I’m officially opening my PO box to listeners of The Ace Couple, to members of the Aspec community. I’ll be putting our PO box address in the show notes here. We’ll put it up on the website if you do want to send that to us. And we’ve even had some people emailing us saying, like, “Hey, can I send you something?” So the answer is yes, you can, and I would love your lengthy letters. I love getting lengthy letters from people. Unless you’re one of the people who’s been harassing and/or stalking me. Then just maybe not.

Courtney: But I also am aware, as far as, like, sending mail, that is more difficult for people. Like, other countries. It’s more expensive to send a letter, et cetera. So that’s fine. You still can email us personal stories if you want to just share it with us. And although I don’t respond well to emails, I do read every single one. So if you are not going to be sorely disappointed if you don’t get a reply, but you just want to share something with us, it does actually — it is very meaningful to us and I do read them. And I am just constantly shrouded in a layer of guilt that I don’t have the time and mental capacity to actually respond to all of those in the way they deserve. So I do just want to set expectations with that.

Courtney: And I hope to get some lovely letters from some of you! Let’s be little Ace pen pals. Maybe I’ll send you a sticker, because I’ve been collecting so many stickers [laughing] from talented artists on the MarketplACE. I don’t know what to do with all these stickers, but I love them all.

Courtney: So yes, on that note, today, we do not have a featured MarketplACE vendor of the week, but I am going to just plug our MarketplACE shop entry form. If you are an Aromantic and/or Asexual small business owner and you would like your shop to be featured on our website on the MarketplACE, and perhaps even get a shout out in a future episode of the Ace Couple podcast, you can fill out our shop entry form link in the show notes.

Courtney: And despite our beautiful new logo and branding, we still don’t have a competent intro and outro. So… that’s it! Bye!