#Unrelatedly

[brotherhumphrey]

had my Bath for the week and then immediately got shat on by [i say this through clenched teeth] one of god's blessed creatures. clearly this is some kind of divine retribution

[infiniteglitterfall]

Palestinians to platform, part 1

مؤمن الناطور / Moumen Al-Natour

@MoumALnatour

رئيس الشباب الفلسطيني للتنمية / President of Palestinian Youth for Development

Moumen Al-Natour is amazing. Not only does he run a Palestinian youth organization that is doing great work in Gaza, but he's also one of the organizers of the 2019 anti-Hamas protests.

Even to criticize Hamas, in Gaza, means to be interrogated, and potentially jailed, tortured, and/or killed. To actively protest Hamas is many times more dangerous.

To have survived that work and continued doing it? I cannot imagine the emotional strength this dude has.

Here's what Center for Peace Communications (another great organization) has said about him:

So many Palestinians, in or from Palestine, are out there talking about what everyday life in Gaza is like. About Hamas, about Israel, about what they want and what they need, about their struggles and their interests and their families.

My goal, in finding people for you to follow and platform, is to help more voices get out of Gaza after years of suppression, and to help more outsiders (like me) connect with them.

People care SO MUCH about Palestine. But frequently, all there is to share is outrage, semi-accurate news, and more outrage. Frequently, we're not calling for the same things they are. We call for a ceasefire; they demand Hamas return the hostages and surrender. We call for Israel to let aid in; they say Israel is letting the aid in, but it's being stolen, and call for air drops rather than trucks. We call for Israel to stop fighting; they say they hope Israel takes Hamas out first.

We aren't centering their voices and experiences. We aren't lending our reach and our strength to their demands.

I want to make that possible.

Ala Mushtaha, the son of this imam, evidently said, “On Saturday December 30, our front door was busted down and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza."

“One dragged him by his head and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.

“He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.”

ok this dude needs his own post honestly, he goes on to say so much intense stuff about their lives.

OMG his dad was actually released!

This is what I'm talking about. This is effective activism. Imagine what all these people could do if they had the entire global pro-Palestinian movement behind them.

Al-Natour posts a fair amount of political commentary.

The "we want to live" hashtag is a callback to the amazing "We Want To Live" protests he co-organized against Hamas, in Gaza in 2019, and again in the summer of 2023. Activist Hamida Howidzy (who will also be getting a separate post) wrote about them in Newsweek recently.

Some things he posts in Arabic and then in English. Some of his posts are in Arabic only. In the thread above, he actually posted a couple more that were just in Arabic, presumably aimed at Arabic-language comments.

What I like about Twitter is that you can whack the "translate post" button and get a pretty decent translation most of the time.

Translation:

"I saw all the responses... What is wrong and forbidden in reuniting the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem through elections in which the people choose who will represent them??!?? Why are all the responses offensive...a collaborator, a traitor, and contain insults that indicate that whoever wrote them needs restructuring?! What prevents us, after ending the war, from returning our choice and choice to the Palestinian people?!+

"Everyone wrote that I opened??!! how did you know???!! Stopping the war is the most important thing now... Whoever sees the condition of the people and feels all this is easy for him does not have humanity, and is not a human being... Whoever, after the destruction of more than 80% of Gaza and the North, and still writing in a way that wants the war to continue while he lives abroad, should reconsider. He accepted to live the same suffering!++"

Note: I copied the "I opened" bit and threw it into Google Translate separately, because that cannot be right. It still insisted that it meant "I opened".... but it gave me the transliterated words, "ani fatah."

Everyone wrote that he's Fatah -- the party that runs the West Bank, the one Hamas violently kicked out of Gaza in 2007-08.

"The end of my speech... I know... whoever is not with you is a traitor and an agent... shameful... by God, by God, by God... there will be an account[ing] for all of this talk... so that you understand the word agent... and the account will be through a government of law... It is clear that there are many who benefit from the poverty and destruction of Gaza, and they must be held accountable according to the law.

"Have mercy on people with your tongues"

The comment on that one is noteworthy:

"Yes, whoever is not with the resistance is indeed a traitor, and those who must be held accountable are the traitors, agents, hypocrites, liars, and racists who slander the resistance and who want to hold it accountable only because it fights the enemy of humanity and defends truth and the oppressed. If you want to apply the law, apply it to yourselves first."

It highlights how much of what we hear in the West is Hamas propaganda. That's a whole other post too. But Hamas claims to be "the resistance," to "defend truth and the oppressed," while arresting people who refuse to preach its propaganda. While jailing and torturing someone 20 times for organizing a protest.

Which are the exact tactics that make it so easy for their propaganda to reach us . And so hard for us to even know that there has been an entire protest movement against Hamas in Gaza, much less to support its activists.

I'll just cut and paste the translations from his most recent thread, above. All emphasis is mine:

"When demonstrations took place in Israel demanding that Netanyahu stop the war and free the hostages, Al Jazeera and Hamas considered it a victory and an achievement, and that the Israeli government was under pressure. But what is striking is that these demonstrations were not suppressed. They were secured. The hostage issue and public pressure were dealt with professionally.

"The demonstrations that took place in Gaza demanding an end to the war and the return of the displaced...they were classified as suspicious [by Al Jazeera etc] ...even though the displaced Israeli lives in a 5-star hotel and has the privileges of the displaced, and when the Palestinian displaced in Gaza receives help, he needs a mediator, and if he wants a tent, he needs leadership intervention, and if he does not have the mediator And the intervention wants to scratch his pocket..+++

"Why did Israel allow demonstrations and look pressured, always trying to contain everything... while we have a displaced person lost, homeless, and no one is trying to contain him, and when he talks, they call him a fifth column???"

Last month, he posted about pregnancy in wartime. Note the cost of the tent later in this thread! Numerous Palestinians have posted about humanitarian aid getting stolen -- by Hamas, by NGOs, by others -- and sold on the black market. Food and tents especially get mentioned a lot. Everyone mentions the tents are being sold for more than (the equivalent of) $700, even though they were supposed to be free.

I'll leave you with this one for now:

You can read all the posts in this series in my "platform palestine" tag.

[petrichorthefox]

Pleeeeease tell us more about the Sacrifice comic!!!

(tysm for your ask it takes a while to make art so writing is fun) Its the beginning of the end for the Lamb. This is after the ending of the game, all the bishops and Narinder are as followers and the four crowns are without owners. This is something the Mystic Seller is willing to turn into an opportunity for control, seen in my previous drawings/comics. A being above the fray and the creatures struggling for their own power. The Lamb, as the only crown vessel at this time, is in the unique position to be placed at the top of a new heirarchy. This is, however, only possible if they agree to it. It is safe to say the Lamb has reached Ascension and achieved godhood with the sacrifice of a purely devoted follower. A follower with unique ties and strong bonds to the Lamb, required as trade with the Mystic Seller. What this means for the cult, for the bishops, and everyone tied to the Lamb, theres more coming on that. If theres specifics yall are curious about such as leshycat or certain bishops, cultist ocs, etc, send an ask :)

[simplydm]

I still think a Hermitcraft Shakespearean play (in Minecraft [or irl omg imagine]) would be hilarious. I’d watch that shit

[puzzled-pegasus]

guys don't read your fanfic from a year ago okay just don't do it

/j

[soufre-de-paris]

facts: anyone named oberon is pathetic, but not in the cute poor little meow-meow way, but rather in exactly the way that makes one want to smack them upside the head with something in hopes of jostling free some sense

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

im not a very anxious guy but i do get anxiety attacks i think which is fucked up bc my brain just makes up shit about how everything i did i messed up on for like 20 minutes and im like okay my heartbeat biologically sped up like 2 notches and i started sweating and thats enough to convince u somethings scary and get u to just lie like that

[ryanthedemiboy]

...i'm suddenly awake. brb

they should let you get xrays and mris just cause. i wanna see what my skelinton looks like. i wanna see my organs and shit

[fuunsaiki]

i'm glad that as a society we have moved past "share your recent search history" memes, even i'm horrified by how many kiwi, british, and even australian comedians i was trying to find the height of last night, guy montgomery's guy mont spelling bee has absolutely ruined me

[cesium-sheep]

I noticed she's been responding "good" instead of "fine" sometimes lately when I ask how she is, so I pointed it out and she thought about it and decided yeah, that was accurate. she said therapy is hard but productive, and she's been meditating a lot, and she's doing good.

(I was talking to him while he made dinner and he said she hasn't been the same since the first match fell through, but I pointed out she's doing way better than she was last year and he didn't seem all that convinced. I guess despite him actively trying to take it on she still didn't let him see most of that.)

[yellowistheraddest]

ewww... get a room

[sinvulkt]

As someone who detest shipping and prefer tension / platonic above all, my reactions tend to be the exact reverse XD

Like "please keep the tension without breaking it, keep that good tension whole, don't waste it all into romance, and hopefully some people will still write fics with that tension without making it a ship—"

I am rather desperate in certain fandom XD Gen has grown but can still be hard to find in some places.

Whenever a character says- "We were best friends- no, we were more than that..."

My head pops up like a meerkat like "is something queer afoot? Pls 🙏"

But at the same time I'm bracing for the-

"We were like brothers/sisters/siblings"

[deanmarywinchester]

i like this substack article I found while googling jamie loftus’s book on hotdogs. it’s like a poem on the subject of “you can do whatever you want forever” to me

[vaguely-concerned]

having seen at least the rough outlines of all the romances now I have to say that I think emmrich's is probably objectively the best in terms of coherence and completeness of story arc (with the understanding that ultimately the 'best' romance is whichever one makes YOUR heart sing anyway so objectivity is a silly thing to claim that way, it just felt like it's the arc with the most well-paced focused content and the least dangling threads)... but lucanis' is my favourite haha. just. the whole kneeling before your beloved full of reverence but without any of the distance that usually implies??? his complete undramatic certainty and calm in every scene with rook after this, having spent the whole game caught between fear and longing???? mr. lives in a pantry but it says nothing about my psyche don't worry about it it's purely for tactical reasons that I keep myself contained in a small dark room not entirely unlike a cell, love among the parsnips -- finally coming to rook in their room and it's so comfortable and comforting???? after all the times rook supports and comforts him through the game he's finally able to return the same to them when they need it while being so calm and steady and it's so fucking sweet and feels so effortless and with no price attached?????? he basically assigns himself the role of your bodyguard and he WILL stab a god over it??????????????? the turn to protector (which was in his heart all along longing to get out and find a place) of it all????? he sounds like he's found himself unexpectedly stumbling into such a soul-lightening state of revelatory existential relief, full on 'you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves' mary oliver style, and he goes and he shares that with rook and protectively envelops them in it when they're hurting??????????????????????????? hello for the maker's sake hello can anyone hear me?????

[clairesbeauchamp]

BRIDGERTON (2020 -) | 3.01 Out of the Shadows

[jhezenkoss]

number of times i've talked about stuffing starscream today: normal

wait i should teach myself amigurumi to make my World's Ugliest Megatron Plushie (he's the only plushie i own)(i won him in a claw machine)(my boss paid for it) some friends

(every day he glares at me and i think it's long past time he glared at someone else)