stranger-phenomena

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John Oliver platforms Palestinian voices as he advocates for voting for Harris.

If you live in a swing state, please properly consider your role in this election. Remember to distrust the polls, the projections - the presidential election will be infuriatingly close. Nothing is set in stone.

Please think about your queer friends and family, your community that includes people of colour, disabled people, poor people, immigrants. Evaluate the true historical value of what a protest vote does - compare it to the two candidates, one of which will be the president at the end of this final stretch.

Your vote matters. Please, treat it like it does.

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i promise you, the two minutes of personal turmoil you will feel whilst voting for kamala harris will still be infinitely preferable to the four years of hell donald trump will inflict on everyone if he wins

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To all Americans out there:

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answering a couple questions i got on this post since i realized ppl genuinely wanna know:

tl;dr:

israel lets very, very little aid get into gaza. even the UN can't get in as much as they want to. funding individual families, gazan led initiatives, and mutual aid collectives operating out of gaza ensures gazans can provide for themselves and pay for the extremely expensive aid that is available.

with all the civil infrastructure destroyed by israel, the situation on the ground has devolved into unrestricted capitalism, driving up the price of aid (that should be free!). this makes it more urgent for people to have funding for daily survival.

the post linked above has examples of how donating to individual families can help a lot. if you want to help more than one family at a time, there are many gazan-led initiatives focusing on rebuilding their infrastructure and distributing aid fairly that are worth donating to instead of large charities that already get the majority of donations.

as i mentioned in the last post: @/careforgaza on twitter is a nonprofit started by gazans, it's been endorsed by multiple palestinian journalists.

the sameer project is a collective organized by diaspora palestinians offering emergency shelter to gazans.

ele elna elak is a project aiming to bring water, food, shelter, etc. to gazans and has been promoted by bisan owda.

and the municipality of gaza itself is fundraising to rebuild water infrastructure.

all of these organizations are active inside gaza right now and are being run by gazans. if anyone knows of other gazan-led mutual aid projects, nonprofits or charities feel free to link them in the notes! hope this helped!

long answers under the cut!

if you wanna donate to a charity that's absolutely fine, but the thing is most charities (and even the UN!) are unable to make it into gaza in the first place, leaving aid rotting at the egyptian side of the border or subject to israeli settler attacks

not to mention, charities and nonprofits also maintain a paternalistic colonial relationship with the indigenous people they are trying to help, determining what aid they need for them instead of returning power to them and letting them make their own choices

i'm not here to say that one option is better than the other, just that they achieve different things and are equally legitimate. there's an attitude among people who question the legitimacy of these gofundme campaigns that somehow the people promoting them are telling them not to donate to charities. nobody is stopping you from donating to charities. we are just asking that you do not dehumanize the very real gazans in your inbox just because their method of asking for aid is more direct and risky.

unfortunately that's exactly what has happened. because israel destroyed all of gaza's more formalized infrastructure, it seems that organized crime and rampant inflation has taken its place. aid is supposed to be free, but in order to save for evacuation or the cost of living, people have started selling them at an inflated price. and aid that is truly free attracts intense, large crowds that are dangerous to navigate.

this was posted on abc a few days ago

it's pure, unrestrained capitalism. i've had multiple palestinians describe this situation to me confidence. that's why everything's so expensive now. why people have to rent out tiny plots of land for their tents to sit on, why my friend @siraj2024 still has to buy tarps to cover the broken windows of the overpriced bombed out apartment he rented, and why a bag of flour can cost a thousand bucks in the north.

even before israel closed and then bombed the rafah crossing, the egyptian hala travel agency was only allowing people to cross the border if they paid a hefty $5000 USD per adult / $2500 USD per child bribe. it denies doing this, but the hundreds of stories from palestinians say otherwise.

with regard to the economy, here in america we saw something similar happen in the wake of hurricane helene and milton. the podcaster margaret killjoy describes how she saw dual economies rise after asheville was fully cut off from the rest of the country - some people offered each other supplies for free in a sort of mutual aid honor system, and some people required payment when they lent supplies because they themselves needed to buy stuff for their families. these dual economies exist in gaza too. and this means they all still need money to survive.

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b-b-but we’re protecting women, right?

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Source.

More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.

“We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads. 

“Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones,” the letter continued. “As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities.”

The letter describes an “awful situation where only flawed choices are available.”

“In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement,” the letter states.

You can read the letter in full and add your name to those who have signed.

And for those who think their lily-white souls (and they are mostly virtue-signaling white people) should not be tainted by voting for the unclean? Here - you've been given permission by the very people you purport to protect and value by not voting for Harris.

Do your civic duty and vote to protect as many people as you can -- unless you simply do not give a shit about the lives of queer people, Jewish people, women, the elderly, people of color, the disabled, and any other group all across the country and the planet who aren't straight white (male) Christians. In that case, sure, don't vote. That'll show everyone!

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Ultimately people just want to be told a good story. Most people will like Byler if they write it well. A lot of people don't really see it happening, not necessarily because they don't want it to, but because of the lack of precedent. They don't think the Duffers would go there, so they don't even really consider it a possibility. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like it if it happens, but it all comes down to execution. If they do it well, they're subverting expectations in a really good way and people will love it. But if they fumble it, people might say comes out of nowhere (and that might be a fair criticism in that case).

Sure the bigots will throw a fit, but they're going to anyway. Byler or no, Will is still a gay lead in a mainstream show, that's already enough for them to hate it. It's really worth worrying about them.

Also people's reaction to Byler would also be influenced by their overall reaction to the season. People will appreciate it a lot more if it's part of a really good ending vs. if it's part of an overall let down. So I think you're right in that not going to care about Byler too much, because they are more concerned if the show as a whole sticks the landing, and the resolution to Will and Mike's storyline is just one part of that.

Hi!

Just wondering, what do you think will happen to the GA of stranger things if (when) byler is canon in s5?

hi, how are you :)

i’m going to be totally honest- I do think that a lot of them won’t care. they may think it came out of nowhere, but I do think that they’ll probably just run with it. back when I was a GA member, that’s what i did. you kind of just go with it.

unfortunately there definitely will be a lot of the homophobes claiming stranger things went “woke” and making angry posts, but i think we may be surprised how many don’t- a lot of it will be milevens and already fans of the show repeatedly coming back to hate more (and a lot of it will be contained to certain platforms too. it’ll be really bad on twitter and reddit and everything, but those are primarily mileven platforms anyway)

hopefully they do it well enough that (less people) are claiming that it was fanservice- but i guess we’ll see, maybe i have too much hope for the GA

thanks for the ask!

edit: I also want to mention that a lot of the GA won’t be going back and rewatching the rest of the show before or after s5 is out- they won’t remember a lot of what happened before and I really think (or at least really hope) they’ll see byler endgame and just go with it. they don’t really remember what happened before this 🤷‍♀️

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Scrolling through my dash and my wife has spam-posted "Mrs Fiona Charming" in different fonts like that one scene from Shrek 2

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HEY GUYS!!

GUYS!!!

FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!

ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!

We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.

As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:

Spain - 38.72%

Finland - 30.31%

Ireland - 24.86%

Netherlands - 24.15%

Germany - 23.54%

Belgium - 23.09%

So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!

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Fellas, is it kinky to have a body?

Idk about y'all but I personally think anyone referring to scars, vitiligo, and cellulite as a fetish thing is saying more about themselves than they realize they are.

[stranger-phenomena]

Kate Bush's New Music Video in Aid of the Charity War Child

Link to donate here (if you can): https://www.warchild.org.uk/

If you're a UK resident, please also sign the petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

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New Kate Bush album sometime in the next decade probably LET'S GOOOO!!!!!

what what WHAT W HA T

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"Heroes" this and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" that, but what if the Season 5 trailer drops and it's this song

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your friends & partners will actually love it if you enforce your boundaries b/c then they will never again need to guess if they're ever making you uncomfortable & don't know. healthy living tip :)

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The original post I saw seems no longer rebloggable, but here. Current as of October 18, 2024.

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Look, I love good practical effects as much as the next person, but I am so sick of this practical >>>> cgi truism that gets thrown around like a goddman mantra.

Firstly, it devalues the work of cgi artists, who put a lot of time and effort into effects that are often so seemless you don't even notice that they're cgi (where's the praise for that?). And secondly because I keep seeing downright obvious practical effects (like, I'm sorry, the two examples from Dungeons and Dragons at the top of this) being praised as stunning through the sheer virture of being practical instead of cg.

I look at those cat people and that birdman and I go "those are puppets." Technially impressive puppets I'm sure, but puppets nonetheless. For me that's just as immersion breaking as an obvious cgi creation. Personally, I would much rather a good cgi version that looks like a living, breathing creature, than a puppet that I can tell "is really there" but can also tell that it's a puppet.

We need to stop portraying practical and cg effects as rival artforms, where cg is evil and practical is good. They are two different methods of achiving an effect, and we should use the one that achieves the best result, not the one we have arbitrarily deemed to be morally superior, to the point where we activly ignore it's shortcomings, and overlook the good qualities of the other. Because I swear, we are this close to praising spray-painted green bubblewrap a la 70s Doctor Who as daring cutting-edge design in the year of our lord 2024, just for being practical.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale