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house of leaves is the perfect book for people who love wikipedia but wish it could be scarier

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They should add a feature to this website where you can browse someone’s blog by inputting a short phrase and then a search algorithm would retrieve all the posts containing it

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whats it like to lock your fingers with someone you love

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Since the outbreak of armed conflict in Tigray in November 2020, Amhara security forces and interim authorities have carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Tigrayan population in Western Tigray, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Recent Human Rights Watch research found that two officials, Col. Demeke Zewdu and Belay Ayalew, who were previously implicated in abuses, continue to be involved in arbitrary detention, torture, and forced deportations of Tigrayans.

“The November truce in northern Ethiopia has not brought about an end to the ethnic cleansing of Tigrayans in Western Tigray Zone,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy African director at Human Rights Watch. “If the Ethiopian government is really serious about ensuring justice for abuses, then it should stop opposing independent investigations into the atrocities in Western Tigray and hold abusive officials and commanders to account.”

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i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner's garden.

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i dont want the nonchalance I want the obsessive passionate ravenous bloodthirsty chaotic love for each other !!!!

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I am hungry for touch & ashamed to be looked at

— Safia Elhillo, from "Summer," Girls That Never Die

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“We must not tell ourselves that the indeterminate, the uncertain, the un-obvious, is a weakness. We must say to ourselves that it opens our minds to unexpected forms of complexities. The Tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, scared thinking, it is a thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. All the poets have said it. The gasping, the breathing, the pulse, the misfortunes, the fears, the insane hopes, and the sterile obsessions. All of these need to be relearned and remixed. The poetics of this endeavor seems more important than the categories of quick thinking, that lead to definitive and fixed conclusions. We understand the world better if we tremble with it.”

— Édouard Glissant in One World In Relation (2010), Manthia Diawara. Film.

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Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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god i'm so tired of everybody's bad faith interpretations of everything. where's the trust. where's the forgiveness. where's the understanding that most things are complex and most people have many layers. and like the black eyed peas once said. where is the love

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pinkpantheress by aidan zamiri

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gripping my thighs with my nails about this

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I thought I’d be able to write a semi coherent post expressing my thoughts on the finale and the book overall after stepping away from it for a while. But as I’ve started thinking about it again, I’ve only gotten more annoyed. So here’s some disorganized rambling on my issues with Blades 2 instead. Probably just gonna make separate posts for my thoughts as they come to me.

I feel like I should start with Valax because she’s one of the biggest reasons why I feel like this book was absolute dogshit tbh. When you create a whole new character who will eventually be instated as member of the main friend group or an LI, there’s a certain amount of prep work that has to go into establishing them as a character. That work doubles when the character starts off in opposition to the MC or other important characters. And in Valax’s case, not only did she start off simply opposing MC and what we stood for, she stole us from our home and family, forced and kept us in a vulnerable state (for a year? 2 weeks? do we even know atp?), and then violated us by quite literally trying to bleed us dry.

MC’s kidnapping and torture were the catalyst for this entire book. Yet the perpetrator doesn’t have to acknowledge anything that she did at all… Our friends can ignore and downplay what happened (even though it was apparently oh so hard without us) for the better half of the book… And worst of all, MC defaults to brushing everything off, placing trust in this person, and even going out of the way to empathize with her at every turn.

We have the option to express some anger and frustration with our friends’ treatment of us in a rushed scene in the second to last chapter of the book. But that’s where the majority of the focus goes. The only mention of Valax is MC expressing confusion about her role in things and a little bit of hurt about being “betrayed”. Yet up until that point, the writers had done nothing meaningful outside of diamond scenes to actually establish her as someone that could be trusted or become a friend, nothing to show that she could empathize with MC and the insane amount of trauma inflicted on MC and friends because of her, and nothing to prove that she was even seeking forgiveness for it in the first place.

Then to add the icing on the cake, they turn around and invoke the word “friend” in reference to Valax at every opportunity in the last chapter. They have her claiming she couldn’t hurt us. Pouting and shedding a couple of tears in what is probably the most ridiculous and melodramatic CG I’ve ever seen. And MC once again empathizing with her at every turn. Placing trust in her, protecting her, standing up for her, offering to leave her friends, family, and entire life behind to go to the Shadow realm with her.

It’s already been established that MC was basically just a tool the writers used to tell all of the other characters’ (especially Nia’s) stories. But as of now, I feel Valax far surpasses Nia in that regard. MC had to bleed, lose time that can’t be replaced, have her agency stripped from her, and ultimately suffer in silence through all of it just so Valax (a completely new character) could have her lackluster story told in scenes that you don’t even see if you don’t pay for them.

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can’t criticize plastic surgery as an institution because it’s none of your business if a woman wants to “fix” her insecurities. can’t criticize the makeup industry or beauty standards because some women feel good when they shave and wear makeup. can’t bring up the challenges women face in the workplace because some women want to be stay at home wives instead of working. everything a woman does is automatically feminist and we shouldn’t stop to think about the context surrounding her actions because that would be misogynistic. here’s what i had for girl dinner. according to my girl math the barbie movie was a revolutionary piece of feminist media. i may not show it but i feel the life slowly draining from me day by day.

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(SCAN) RED VELVET 2024 SEASON’S GREETINGS - YERI

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Source

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ELLA BALINSKA as Cherie in Run Sweetheart Run (2020)