#been sitting on some other stuff too.

[moe-broey]

Holy shit... it's fucking green outside. And warm

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[decoy-sammy]

No ones heard him scream this loud before..

[jakeperalta]

it is actually so unfair how being quiet is treated as a character flaw that needs fixing in every area of life

[emily-mooon]

60s spy au Nordegrim anyone?

[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.

[icewindandboringhorror]

There's always a slight yearning in the back of my mind wishing I had been born in the right place, time, family situation, income level, etc. to have just lived in one single house for my entire life. Imagine being born in a place that still suits you, even through all of your personal evolutions and etc. The idea of deep familiarity with an area because you've lived and explored it for 40+ years, being encased in a web of memories and connections. Being able to clean out your old childhood bedroom and find personal artifacts, to dig in the yard and remember. I know those lives can still be plenty imperfect, but there's just something so seemingly solid and stable and Grounding about it that I sometimes wish I could have.. (At least from my outside perspective as someone who's moved around a bit geographically and even within the same area, never lives in the same house/ apartment /etc. for more than a few years usually.) Like... having a place that is printed upon, fully your own, rather than chronically a visitor, every thought of a space always tempered with the notion that one day soon you'll have to pack it all up again, etc. There's something peaceful about the permanence.

[donaviolet]

Friendship is the most special thing in the world because no award could be give me bigger happiness than jumping around in my room and smiling because my pookie asked me if I wanted to match pfps

[j-esbian]

i lost the post but i saw someone talking about how some of y’all act like being weird is a choice and like. YEAHHHHHHH.

that’s fine, it might be for you. but i just live like this and don’t know any other way. like yeah i’ve worked customer service, i can do innocuous small talk, but anything beyond that, i don’t understand what i’m missing. and it’s frustrating to see the tonal disconnect especially from people who are like “uwu embrace weirdness!!” where they’re like. dressing quirky and talking about bugs and listening to obscure music and eschewing small talk to ask Deep Questions on the first date and unlearning their tendency to not infodump. and generally have an idea of what Weirdness is supposed to look like. idk man some of us wake up and get out of bed and can’t figure out why the rest of their coworkers chitchat with each other but when they join the conversation it dies.

weirdness is value neutral. let’s stop trying to turn it into a badge because quite frankly, it’s not a choice for everyone. it’s fucking exhausting to never be on the same wavelength as other people and they’re going to react the way they do and label you the way they will without any conscious actions on your end. it’s difficult to talk about this without feeling like you’ll be dismissed as immature, a teenager whining “no one understands me” but the thing is. sometimes you don’t grow out of feeling alone and different, and there’s no good way to talk about it without feeling like people will think you’re just fishing for pity.

[theygender]

I've got too many games I want to play and not enough free time 😭 I still need to finish my BG3 playthrough but since Endless Ocean: Luminous came out I've been playing a lot of that instead. Also just got back into Wizard101 last night. Started playing House Flipper again last weekend. Still need to finish BOTW so I can start a TOTK playthrough and finish Pokemon Shield so I can start on Pokemon Violet. I've been fighting off the urge to start up a new Skyrim playthrough for weeks. My brother just told me that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is getting ported to the Switch. And now I'm suddenly feeling inspired to replay DAI... And throughout all of this I'm also playing the hell out of DragonVale on my phone. Someone just pay me to play video games all day please

[kuromi-hoemie]

hey younger ppl who grew up with strict parents, i want to share something really lovely with you that i didn't really learn myself until this year.

you do NOT have to clean ur house when u have guests over. like yeah pickup anything particularly embarrassing but have you not felt more welcomed, happy and cozy when you visited a friend's home and saw Stuff everywhere? is it not more inviting to enter a home that looks and feels very Lived In? do you not feel self-conscious about contributing to any sort of mess in a home so clean and organized it feels sterile?

Don't feel the need to keep this weird facade ingrained into us that your place needs to look perfect in order for you to hang out - just invite people over! Let them see what you're about, let the Environmental Storytelling™ do some work! i promise you it's very charming being able To See what you do and enjoy.

it took way longer than it should've for me to accept this and it's been GREAT. i don't dread the deep cleaning that having a guest used to entail because nowhere near that amount of work is necessary to hang out anymore - and I think everyone deserves to know that they don't have to work so dang hard for something that's really so so simple.

[doomxdriven]

[bucephaly]

I keep seeing posts of people saying that a term transphobes stole and are using incorrectly to be transphobes is a Horrible Transphobic Term and Anyone who uses it is transphobic and it's Not Real and Entirely Not True when it's literally an actual anthropological term that has studies about it and is actually very useful for Everyone to think about, cis and trans, and be critical of. I hate seeing people respond to dumb hate by entirely writing off everything even remotely connected to the twisted shit bigots use when the shit the bigots are stealing and twisting is still like... a thing?

[aria0fgold]

Just been in a daydreaming mood and I ended up accidentally making a pretty neat AU for my dearest sons, Alec and Ray. But now that I'm writing it all down, my brain suddenly came into a screeching halt as I got into the deep philosophies of it and I'm like: hwat--

[bmpmp3]

Getting into stuff that has a lot of pre-announced release dates is really good for me like vocal synthesizer products and new love live etc franchise music releases....I'll be lying in bed at like 2 AM with ur usual 20-something's fear and existentialism over time and the future and then I'll remember a piece of singing software or a new song related to cartoon characters I like is gonna come out like next month and I'm like 😌

[arodrwho]

me occasionally like a fool: hehe my bones are sooo sexy now im basically cured

my hip when i'm just sat there minding my own business: bitch