#achiever computer

[tenowls]

rivals

[ghoulbats]

link

[aka-indulgence]

Good news, I’ve gotten the dive computer! :D Thank you so much to everyone who’s supported me through commission/kofi doodles/tipping, I can now go blub blub in the ocean 🌊🥳

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

DAVE: i took a controversial new pill that accelerates my brain

ROSE: So you’re smart now?

DAVE: im stupid faster

DAVE, TRIUMPHANTLY: im doing 1000 calculations per second and theyre all wrong

[teaah-art]

The strongest and loneliest man in the world, written by god herself

Piece for @orv-gotcha-for-gaza

Prompt: 'Han Sooyoung holding a pen to some paper, and the ink trailing down into a dark scene of Ways of Survival', requested by @noteinabottle168

[thatswhatsushesaid]

just like with machine learning, we can and should demystify “the cloud” without demonizing it in the process. cloud computing and cloud storage architecture are extremely useful tools; it’s how they get deployed by big tech companies that can be a problem.

[viralarcadian]

[avocado62524]

[baura-bear]

what's pissing me off most about the election is how many people who have similar opinions are absolutely tearing into each other in search of someone to "blame" for the trump win. It doesn't matter what we could've done differently because at the end of the day it's done. blaming each other and turning on each other is only gonna help the white supremacists who want to run this country. so instead we need to focus on creating community so that we have a network of resistance and care built into our lives. tear into trump supporters all you want but if you are anti trump, if you were discontent with both options, if you were/are whatever, focus on people who share the same ideas as you and how you can build each other up and make your community stronger. that is where revolution begins. not yelling about ballots that have already been cast.

[funky-dealer]

im fucking free

[tuna-keyboard]

oh yeah, you know me, i'm a chronic gamer. notorious game player. buddy i've played so many games you don't even know. Finishing? you're confused, i said i play games, i never said i finish them

[humdrummoloch]

How do I put what's in my head onto the page? Is it always hard?

Hello!

If you're asking me how to make the writing live up to the fantasy, just remember: writing isn't a transcription service, it's an art form.

Writing isn't thinking, but between you and me, thinking isn't that great anyways. It's like singing in the shower. Thinking needs to be translated through a skill like writing before it'll make a good scene.

Creation is choices and actions, not recreation. Let me give you an example: I crocheted my dog recently, and I didn't aim to perfectly recreate my dog in tiny crochet form. Instead, while I crocheted, I converted her into a small character with plushie proportions. She had all her recognisable features and was a pretty good crochet dog, checked all the boxes, Dad was happy. But the little crochet dog didn't look exactly how the subject did, sat there wagging on the rug. That's because I wasn't trying to copy her. I was trying to crochet her. In the same way, I don't transcribe my daydreams, I convert them into writing form, and that's 90% less frustrating and 100% more possible.

As for whether writing remains hard forever, yes and no. Writing becomes easier with practice the same way anything does, but it gets harder as you naturally challenge yourself to write better, like a bodybuilder increasing the weights. But if you stop expecting writing to come out 'correctly' and instead lose yourself in the process, you won't feel the dead ends, you'll be too busy finding solutions and thinking on your feet -- you'll be in the zone.

I just wish I knew how to do that on command!

-HM

[seekerofrealitys-blog]

🎊🎊🥳🥳

End term practical marks has been declared......

It's so satisfying seeing my hard work paying off.

I didn't believe I will do so better in programming even tho it's my first time ever to learn programming.

I just want to dance today!!!!.

[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.