#end violence now

[harmonyhealinghub]

Red Dress Day: Honouring Memories and Raising Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People

May 6, 2024

Shaina Tranquilino

In Canada, Red Dress Day serves as a poignant reminder of the ongoing crisis surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people (MMIWG2S). This solemn occasion, marked by the hanging of red dresses in public spaces, symbolizes the lives lost and the urgent need for justice and systemic change. As we commemorate Red Dress Day, it's crucial to reflect on the profound impact of this crisis and renew our commitment to advocating for the rights and safety of Indigenous communities across the country.

The Significance of the Red Dress:

The red dress has become a powerful symbol in the movement to raise awareness about MMIWG2S. It represents the women, girls, and two-spirit individuals who have gone missing or been murdered, their spirits, and the bloodshed that continues to stain the fabric of Indigenous communities. Each red dress hung serves as a silent tribute, a visual reminder of lives cut short and families torn apart by violence and injustice.

Honouring the Memories:

Red Dress Day is a time for reflection and remembrance. It's an opportunity for communities to come together to honour the memories of those who are no longer with us. Through ceremonies, gatherings, and art installations, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike pay tribute to the lives lost and reaffirm their commitment to seeking justice and accountability. It's a solemn occasion but also a chance to celebrate the resilience and strength of Indigenous communities in the face of adversity.

Raising Awareness and Demanding Action:

Beyond remembrance, Red Dress Day serves as a call to action. It's a reminder that the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people is not a thing of the past but a present-day reality. Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by violence and are more likely to experience homicide or disappearance compared to non-Indigenous women. This alarming statistic underscores the urgent need for systemic change to address the root causes of this crisis, including colonialism, systemic racism, poverty, and inadequate access to resources and support services.

Advocates and activists use Red Dress Day as an opportunity to raise awareness about MMIWG2S and to demand action from governments, law enforcement agencies, and society at large. They call for improved support services for victims and their families, culturally sensitive policing practices, and meaningful efforts to address the underlying factors that contribute to violence against Indigenous women and girls. By amplifying their voices and advocating for change, they strive to ensure that the lives lost are not forgotten and that future generations can live free from fear and harm.

Red Dress Day is a solemn yet empowering occasion that reminds us of the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people in Canada. As we honour the memories of those who are no longer with us, we must also recommit ourselves to the fight for justice, equality, and respect for Indigenous rights. By standing in solidarity with Indigenous communities and demanding action from our leaders, we can work towards a future where every woman, girl, and two-spirit person is safe, valued, and able to live their lives free from violence and discrimination.

[drenched-in-sunlight]

i love the DLC man

[smile-files]

something interesting i realized while on the vessel-making screen in the deltarune introduction is that it's physically impossible to make kris: there is no hair that perfectly matches theirs (none have the cowlick or the right jagged shape on the bottom), and there is no sweater that perfectly matches theirs (none have a single stripe). this is fascinating, as it perhaps suggest that, if we (the player) had a choice, we *wouldn't* make kris. they aren't something we want, or are even capable of wanting, rather something we're stuck with.

and i suppose the fact that they can't be *created* as a vessel is telling, because we didn't create kris -- they weren't made for us, they're not a player avatar. they're a pre-existing person we just happen to gain possession of.

we weren't made for each other; they don't want us, and we don't seem to want them either (if the inability to choose to create someone like them says anything); funny, then, that in a way we're "soulmates"...

(both pictures are from the deltarune wiki!)

[yourockthebeatofmyheart]

Puppet History season 1: cute lil puppet teaches his pals about weird events throughout history

Puppet History season 5: Ryan fistfights an evil hologram who’s trying to make a skin-suit out of him, eventually yeets said hologram through a window, and wishes for a crafty genie to save The Professor from being obliterated by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs and bring him back to the present so he can make amends for trying to kill the lil guy

[levemetal]

Day 2: Timeloop / Xiao Qi and Jiu Ge

I am cringe and I am not even free

Feel free to reuse this idea but 24 hours are not enough for me to finish an entire comic. I could have taken the simpler prompt but nOOOOOO timeloop is too tempting. Past me why are we like this

[eskildit]

i think a lot about hot sauce and jeannemary. two young girls so ready to kill and to die. a comparison made all the worse when you recall that hot sauce lost all her family to the cohort, that she can specifically recall fourth style necromancy (using corpses as bombs). a fourteen and thirteen year old that could easily have been on opposite sides of the same front line. 

[yesloulou]

Daniel trains in the sim with McLaren | July 13, 2022

[thewhizzyhead]

before I do the long feminist recontextualization ramble on lmm's warriors album, I must note that the album, despite it being lmm's grittiest work, has such a hopeful tone in it especially near the end. Perhaps the hopeful tones really shine through especially in the backdrop of among the grittiest subject matter featured in MT, but there is something so heartwarming in this being a VERY intentional choice - what with cyrus' dream and the songs that follow with cleon and the gramercy riffs. in their grief and sorrow especially they still sing of giving life meaning - breathing in and believing in the hope of unification against the bigger forces in tow (acab). And this shines especially so with this album's interpretation that the gangs are more of community protectors than deviants and ruffians - and the reason they all believed in Cyrus in the first place is because they wanted a better city for their constituents.

simply said in "somewhere in the city" and simply repeated in the album's finale, they seek a city where they all come home alive.

[bixels]

So I l’ve been getting into your ko crisis story lately (it all sounds rlly awesome btw) and i was curious - you’ve said in the tags in a previous ask that ash is comphet, so is that gonna play a major role in her character arc/journey in any way?

Yeah, the story basically covers her journey of redefining her identity as a queer Asian-American disabled woman in a sports-entertainment industry, which is a media landscape that specifically targets, exploits, and fetishizes people like her.

[lunarharp]

played dragon age 2...just simple scribbles

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Besties can't enable pvp on each other, right?

[First] Prev <--> Next

[ashlakh]

[x]

[hostilecandle]

I just saw a post unironically being up in arms and pissed that the pricegaz ship exists because "a captain and a sergeant is a huge power imbalance" Please I need yall to be so fucking for real with me rn 😭😭 I've seen this take so many times and enough is enough.

Look at me, I'm gonna tell ya something, come closer- YOURE IN THE FUCKING WAR FANDOM. For the love of God get off your morality high horse and come back to earth for a second. I'm begging you to go touch some grass. If you want to play a morality game, a power imbalance between an officer and those he's in charge of should be the LAST of your worries in this fandom. (Also how funny that ghost and soap weren't mentioned as a power imbalance when it's just as bad. Yeah I fucking caught that you hypocrite)

Like come on let's be for real, if you really cared about fictional morality issues, well you wouldn't be in this fandom would you? You would be beyond pissed and sick to your stomach that there's war, actual torture, racism, and all the other "fun" things that come in a game about a proxy war and terrorists for fucks sake. You don't have any box to stand on, you're in the CALL OF DUTY FANDOM 😭😭😭 Yall wanna be special and unique SO bad. Yall just want a reason to say you're better than others and you froth at the mouth at the chance to do so.

You know this shit ain't real. You know it's a game but even still, you have to try and find something to make you better than those degenerates and it's pathetic. And again if you really cared, this game series as a whole should offend you. If yall are really so pressed about fiction and reality this whole series should make you want to throw up. This is the game series that brags about how realistic it is and how they've brought in people who've experienced this to make it as real as possible. But wait, you don't care about morality as long as it's fictional children and brown people being murdered but GOD FORBID Gaz takes a cock up his ass from Price. Its just gone TOO FAR 🙄🙄

Obligatory you can just dislike a ship for any reason. Things are allowed to squick you out. That's FINE. That's good and healthy even. You don't have to like every ship. What pisses me off is the moral soap box yall have to stand on to preach and prove why you dont like it and why everyone who does like it is bad. Idc someone doesnt ship gazprice, (I enjoy it but personally have ships I like better myself) but getting mad it exists is genuinely, and i cant stress this enough, pathetic. It's old and I'm so sick of seeing it. This is not the fandom for these games. Go back to something made for children if you want to have the moral understanding of one.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

FOR A BEAT OF HEART, THE BREATH IS SHOT. AND WITHIN A BREATH, THE HEART IS CAUGHT. THE PIPES ARE BURSTING, UNDER GREAT STRESS, BOLTS TORN ASUNDER, MAKING A MESS. A FINAL COUGH, A FINAL RETCH, A GOREY SLOUGH, CLAIMED BY WRETCH.

[daddysroyalwhore]

“Believe that though we never eat

We still know how to feed

We still know how to bleed, oh

Sugar, I've developed a taste for you now”

[sticks-and-souls]

Anakin & Letting Go

I always found it to be a little skeptical that Anakin could become a force ghost after it took Yoda, Qui Gon, and Obi-Wan learning and training how to do it, and I always thought “really? Anakin? Finding that level of peace and letting go?” But after this episode, seeing the care and lesson that he imparts upon Ahsoka that he learned so painfully, I understand it from him so much better. Vader was so stuck in his complete self-hatred that he allowed nobody who had known him before as Anakin to reach him (most notably Obi-Wan and Ahsoka) because of the overwhelming extent of his shame. It took his son, who had never known him and yet who still stood before him and believed in him, loved him, sacrificed himself for him, to call Anakin back from the depths of Vader. And this Anakin, let everything go to save his son and to allow his son to save him.

And it felt so impactful to get to see this mature post-Vader Anakin reaching out to Ahsoka to teach her this very hard-earned lesson that he took the very hard road to get. Because she has Vader in her. She is everything Anakin taught her, and we saw the behaviors that led Anakin to becoming Vader—the fear of losing his most cherished relationships—reaching out of Anakin very early in the clone wars (and before) and the two of them are both very aware that he imparted those lessons on her. And then we've seen across this season—and overtly in her clone wars flashbacks—that she believes she is inextricable from these traits.

I’ve always loved Anakin as a fictional character, getting to see his earnestness, his flawedness, and his intensity (to borrow Huyang’s very accurate adjective), but this episode brought a level of humanity to him that has moved me so deeply. Life is HARD, loss gets forced on all of us no matter what, and the lessons that we learn through mistakes that we made can be extremely painful because acknowledging and taking responsibility for hurting people is actually really painful for humans (not owning up to our actions is the emotionally easier choice and George Lucas has stated time and again that the Dark Side is about taking the short-term easier choices). But it ultimately means that learning from your mistakes is an actual choice you have to MAKE. And this is the core of Anakin’s lesson. He is teaching Ahsoka that she has to choose which lessons he has taught her that she will live by, but more than that, that she is empowered to be able to choose. Yes, she has everything that he taught her—the good and the bad—but she is not condemned to live out all of the lessons. 

And the beauty of it isn't just the lesson, but that Anakin gets to be the one to teach it to her. The betrayal that she experienced in discovering his fall, the taintedness that she has been portraying that she feels about herself, gets specifically addressed because if he figured it out, then she definitely can too. If he is more than just Vader, then she is too. And THAT is what the "Is that what this is about?" line is actually about. It's so so important that we get to see pre-Vader, Vader, and post-Vader across her vision because the point is that yes, Vader is a part of him, and that brilliant shot of the two of them glaring Sith eyes across the blade at each other did it's job in conveying that Ahsoka is capable of that darkness too, but you are not only the darkness. You get to choose. ("You're more than [death and destruction] because I'm more than that"). And more to the point, you have to choose. Because if you don't specifically choose to fight the dark, then you're ultimately choosing to fall into it. "Fight or die."

So for Anakin to be able to reach out to her one more time, to be able to love her the way he, as Vader, had refused to the last time when they met on Malachor, and to open with “you’re never too old to learn”, because god if he didn’t learn that the hard way too. And to be able to pass on to Ahsoka how to actually let go because he himself had only just finally been able to learn it as well, feels so powerful and poignant.

And that look of pride and wistful sadness that he gives her at the end? That both she and Luke were able to learn so quickly what took him so long? And that maybe, he may have helped save her from the worst traits that he imbued upon her? That’s him having let go of his own shame. He feels grief, he feels guilt—we can see it on his face—but what has happened has happened and he has accepted that, and finally learned that letting go doesn't mean it didn't happen, it means it doesn't have to define your actions going forward.

And finally, it’s also him letting go of ahsoka. By teaching her that she will choose her destiny, he has to accept that he cannot control it either. And he has. “There’s hope for you yet.” 

So yeah, Anakin learned to let go, and getting to see him here, in this headspace of acceptance and peace, practicing and understanding what it means to be a Jedi, was so unexpectedly cathartic and revelatory for me as viewer.