#I'm at an ethics meeting

[penciltech]

"I believe the technical term was: a shitshow"

[ruby-static]

The idea of Riley introducing Arcade to Yes Man has been eating my head for ages- It's gotta be the most awkward first meeting imaginable.

Basic rundown: Shortly after first visiting the Legion Fort, pissing off Caesar and retrieving the platinum chip, Riley decides to open up to Arcade about what he found in Benny's suite after he initially ran off: a new friend with a potential plan to throw all major parties out of New Vegas. So he promises to eventually introduce the two, and imagine Arcade's surprise (or lack thereof) when this 'friend' turns out to be a giant reprogrammed securitron robot.

First impressions are... interesting. I feel like Arcade would definitely be a little unnerved at first, but surprised at the potential for an independent Vegas.

[yo-yo-yoshiko]

I woke up a few mornings ago and decided it was time to find out what George Karizaki was about.

[tomwambsgans]

tomgreg is not "i could fix him" nor "i could make him worse" but "i could make him feel like a real person." from both ends.

[squeakadeeks]

moodboard for this past week ❤️

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

I want to thank Misha Collins for inspiring me to do things that, for legal reasons, I cannot disclose online

and no, this is not a joke. Misha, through GISH especially, showed me not just the power of art-as-activism, but what creative modes function best in that setting, and how to organize and lead such efforts.

what I've done with that knowledge, again, would be legally dangerous to admit online

but I'm so happy I know how to do it. I've become a leader in my community, and a supporter of large and powerful movements.

specifically, those spaces know me as an artist. an artist with endless and diverse creative ideas, who knows no fear, takes no shit and is especially good at resistance and point-making via "funny" and lighthearted art.

would Misha approve of what I'm doing?

most likely, FUCK no he wouldn't

he's made himself damn clear where he stands on this stuff, even via silence alone

but I have him to thank anyway.

[chonideno]

it's crazy what a significant life change will do to you. life feels so much better. like a freshly peeled orange. like laying on a flat, sun-warmed rock. insane weight lifted!! brain rewired!!!

[izzyspussy]

why are they laughing at him as he gets straight up killed??? he doesn't deserve this! he's a sweet kid at heart! he literally just needs one (1) real friend!!

[harri-etvane]

So I watched that three part BBC documentary on Ze and honestly, it was just okay? I think I expected too much from it, which is on me. There was definitely far too much putin - I skipped through most of that.

It does give a solid enough background on the birth of Ukraine as an independent nation & the struggle to get there. There was some nice K95 archival footage in the earlier episode, but no particularly new information. They do give Ze a fair amount of credit outside of the 'comedian to president' pipeline which is v important I think.

Overall, I'd hoped for a lot more from something which made out it would be sort of, in Ze's own words? I'd have much preferred a longform interview with him & surely they must have filmed more than the maybe, idk 30 mins of footage that's sprinkled through the 3 episodes?

For me it was a solid 6/10 - nothing groundbreaking or earth shattering; just a decent enough foundation.

[athousandmorningss]

Lookit all these babies.

[hawkeyedflame]

.

[charmre]

The more I go through business grad school, the more I realize I don't belong and belong in a more creative field

But, idk how stable the creative fields are right now, so I'm in business school trying desperately to fit in yet not????

:////

[lovesour]

musings below

[t1erradelfuego]

as always pls do not interact with this post or read the tags

[eimearkuopio]

The kingdom of heaven will still need mole sanctuaries. But let's all stop living in one. It can be isolated by time instead of space.

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.