#is it still relevant?

[meowmeowmeowimacat]

Hey who’s excited for the Skeleton War

*whispering* that is still a t h i n g, right?

[h0peful-gh0stt]

guess who’s back on mspaint and probably never gonna finish this lmao

surprise it’s me

[littlemut]

[acodraisc]

I have finally caught up on the magnus protocol

[griffinkid]

I've seen "I don't know how to play with toys anymore" a few times lately and just wanted to point out-

Playing with toys looks different for everyone, even actual children!

Playing with toys can look like: 🧸🪁🚂

Taking pictures of your toys and writing captions for them

Brushing or grooming soft toys or toys with rooted hair

Ordering or sorting your toys by colour/species etc

Making up stories, poems or comics about your toys

Dressing or accessorising your toys

Imagining your toys talking to you or each other, forming opinions of their own, etc

Drawing your toys

Taking your toys for a walk outside, even in a backpack or pocket if you don't want to carry them openly

Making lists of the toys you have and where you got them etc

Feel free to add your own ideas

[caffeccino]

Apparently having Crusader Team Spirit is discouraged now 😱

[sixthrock]

the Fun Gang visits the Willy Wonka Experience ™️

[triona-tribblescore]

I WANNA DRAAWW!! RAHHHGG!! Absolutely swamped with college work, im so tired TT (hence whatever tf this is lmao)

[bacchuschucklefuck]

class swap design masterpost for convenience (from top to bottom: bard!riz, cleric!gorgug, sorcerer!kristen, barbarian!fig, artificer!adaine, and rogue!fabian)

[no-passaran]

Spain lied about not selling weapons to Israel.

Even after October 7th, Spain has sold more than 1 million € of weapons to Israel. Norway and Finland make it possible.

In January, Spain made headlines word-wide when the government's Minister of Exteriors, José Manuel Albares (PSOE), claimed in Congress and later again in a radio interview that Spain had stopped selling weapons to Israel ever since October 7th. Israel's intensification of violence in Gaza following October 7th meant that, on top of decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, between October 7th and January 23rd Israel had already killed 28,000 people and forced 2 million out of their home. In this context, many people were demanding their governments stop arming and funding the genocide of the Palestinian people, and here on Tumblr and other social media sites like Twitter I think we all saw the many posts praising the Spanish government for this.

Well, it turns out it was a lie.

According to Albares, "Since October 7th there are no more weapons exportations [from Spain] to Israel". But in November alone, Spain exported weapons to Israel for 987,000€, as was published on the Spanish Government's official website dedicated to exterior commerce (Comex). A researcher from Centre Delàs (an independent centre for peace studies) found it and published it, and it has also been verified by newspapers such as elDiario.es.

This 987,000€ worth of weapons in November was not the only ammunition that Spain has sent to Israel in 2023. In 2023, Spain exported a total of 1.48 million € in war material to Israel.

All of the weapons sent in November come from the factory of Nammo Palencia (Castilla y León), a corporation that is 50% property of the Government of Norway and 50% owned by a public Finnish business. However, even if the owners are foreigners, the ammunition was sent from Spain and thus it had to be authorized by the an organism of the Spanish Government named Junta Interministerial de Defensa y Doble Uso, whose deliberations on whether a weapons exportation is accepted or denied are kept secret. The only cases where they have denied exporting weapons to Israel have been when they thought that Israel would re-sell these weapons to the Philippines.

Spain has had a close relation with Israel for years. As published by the Spanish Government, Spain has sold 20 million € of weapons to Israel between 2012 and 2022. Spain also buys weapons and military software from Israel (for example, the Spanish Intelligence Service has been using the Israeli software Pegasus to illegally spy on Catalan activists, journalists, politicians and civil society members and their relatives to attack the Catalan independence movement), and Spain has continued buying from Israel and allocating defense contracts to Israel even after the October 7th attacks. It is very difficult to track the concessions of public contracts such as buying weapons, but some contracts have been known. For example, on November 24th 2023, Spain bought 287.5 million € of missiles from Israel. This is not unusual: between 2011 and 2021, it is publicly known that Spain bought war material from Israel for at least 268 million €, but experts say that the real number could be two or three times as much.

Spain has also continued allocating concessions to Israel. For example, on December 15th 2023 Spain allocated a contract worth over 576 million € to Israel for a rocket launcher programme. On November 22nd, Spain allocated another another Israeli company to provide missiles for 237 million € at the same time as the Spanish army bought Israeli inhibitors for 1.4 million €. The very next day, November 23rd, Spain signed another military allocation to Israel for 82,600€. The following week, Spain signed yet another allocation with a different Israeli military corporation for 3.7 million €.

Spain also allows Israeli weapon manufacturing companies to produce weapons through their branches located in Spain. This way, Israeli weapons make their way to markets with which Israel doesn't have diplomatic ties but Spain does, like Saudi Arabia. And since Spain is a member of NATO, Israeli weapons produced in Spain are approved according to NATO standards and access it easily. In the same way, these Israeli weapons manufacturers also access European Union defense funds through their branches in Spain. (source).

As I said, I saw a lot of positive posts around when Albares said Spain was going to embargo, but I haven't seen any post about how they didn't do it. I also (personally) haven't seen anything on international media, and barely anything on Spanish media, which is already busy with the PSOE covid material corruption scandal. So I share this in the hope of helping put pressure on Spain to cut all ties with Israel immediately.

SHAME ON EVERYONE WHO GIVES ISRAEL THE MATERIAL AND MONEY THAT WILL BE USED TO MASSACRE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE. SHAME ON SPAIN, NORWAY, AND FINLAND.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

ngl, I'm beginning to take issue with how in conversations about anti-intellectualism almost automatically, the face of girls and women will be slapped on the problem.

[reasonsforhope]

In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the long study of a butterfly once thought extinct has led to a chain reaction of conservation in a long-cultivated region.

The conservation work, along with helping other species, has been so successful that the Fender’s blue butterfly is slated to be downlisted from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species List—only the second time an insect has made such a recovery.

[Note: "the second time" is as of the article publication in November 2022.]

To live out its nectar-drinking existence in the upland prairie ecosystem in northwest Oregon, Fender’s blue relies on the help of other species, including humans, but also ants, and a particular species of lupine.

After Fender’s blue was rediscovered in the 1980s, 50 years after being declared extinct, scientists realized that the net had to be cast wide to ensure its continued survival; work which is now restoring these upland ecosystems to their pre-colonial state, welcoming indigenous knowledge back onto the land, and spreading the Kincaid lupine around the Willamette Valley.

First collected in 1929 [more like "first formally documented by Western scientists"], Fender’s blue disappeared for decades. By the time it was rediscovered only 3,400 or so were estimated to exist, while much of the Willamette Valley that was its home had been turned over to farming on the lowland prairie, and grazing on the slopes and buttes.

Pictured: Female and male Fender’s blue butterflies.

Now its numbers have quadrupled, largely due to a recovery plan enacted by the Fish and Wildlife Service that targeted the revival at scale of Kincaid’s lupine, a perennial flower of equal rarity. Grown en-masse by inmates of correctional facility programs that teach green-thumb skills for when they rejoin society, these finicky flowers have also exploded in numbers.

[Note: Okay, I looked it up, and this is NOT a new kind of shitty greenwashing prison labor. This is in partnership with the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which honestly sounds like pretty good/genuine organization/program to me. These programs specifically offer incarcerated people college credits and professional training/certifications, and many of the courses are written and/or taught by incarcerated individuals, in addition to the substantial mental health benefits (see x, x, x) associated with contact with nature.]

The lupines needed the kind of upland prairie that’s now hard to find in the valley where they once flourished because of the native Kalapuya people’s regular cultural burning of the meadows.

While it sounds counterintuitive to burn a meadow to increase numbers of flowers and butterflies, grasses and forbs [a.k.a. herbs] become too dense in the absence of such disturbances, while their fine soil building eventually creates ideal terrain for woody shrubs, trees, and thus the end of the grassland altogether.

Fender’s blue caterpillars produce a little bit of nectar, which nearby ants eat. This has led over evolutionary time to a co-dependent relationship, where the ants actively protect the caterpillars. High grasses and woody shrubs however prevent the ants from finding the caterpillars, who are then preyed on by other insects.

Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are being welcomed back onto these prairie landscapes to apply their [traditional burning practices], after the FWS discovered that actively managing the grasslands by removing invasive species and keeping the grass short allowed the lupines to flourish.

By restoring the lupines with sweat and fire, the butterflies have returned. There are now more than 10,000 found on the buttes of the Willamette Valley."

-via Good News Network, November 28, 2022

[14dayswithyou]

💖 DAY 4 SNEAK PEEKS! 💖

Hiya Angels!! ^^ Here are some of the Out Of Context™ screenshots I recently shared with the 14DWY Discord boosters... Who also have early access to Day 4 as of right now!

So if you'd like to skip the wait and go on that aquarium outing with [01010111 01101000 01101111 00111111] right now, feel free to join the Discord community and boost the server! Otherwise, keep checking Tumblr and Twitter for more updates and screenshots ^^

[uruwashi-no-nightingale]

update was literally devastating

[bet-on-me-13]

Wes ruins everything

Wes had finally done it, he had finally realized why nobody ever belived him about Fenton and Phantom! It made so much sense now, he had been looking for an answer for years, thinking he was going crazy because everybody refused to see the Obvious!

He was Cursed!

He literally had an Ancestoral Curse on his Bloodline that made it so that all those born with the gift of Prophecy would be ignored! A Gift of Prophecy that he apparently had.

It was Cassandra's Curse, the one from Greek Myths. Apparently she was his Great×1000 Grandmother and passed down the Gift (and Curse) of Prophecy to him. And he knew how to break it!

All he needed to do was gather the right resources, chant the correct incantations, make sure not to accidentally summon a Demon in the process, and he could just foist the Curse onto some other poor schmuck. Sure it would suck for them, and he would loose his Gift of Prophecy, but Wes had been ignored for Years at this point, he needed validation!

So he did the Ritual, and he didn't mess it up, and he managed to get rid of the Curse.

Now all he had to do was convince everybody that he was right for the first time in his life! This was going to be great!

...

Cass didn't know what was going on.

A while ago, she had started getting these...gut feelings that she couldn't explain.

She would look over the details of a Case her Family was working on, and see a patern that the others were seemingly ignoring. Like when she realized that The Penguin was about to raid the Docks on the East Side, but the others were convinced it was going to be on the West.

But when she had tried to tell them, they had brushed her off. "We've already concluded that he will begin the Raid on the West side, no need to go to the East."

She had gone anyways, and low and behold she had been right. But nobody even acknowledged that she had been right at all, they had just wondered how they had missed the signs, not even questioning how she had known.

It wasn't limited to Cases either. Even small things, like telling her brother's where the TV remote was were brushed off, and hours later they would still be looking, never even having checked where she told them.

It seemed that no matter what, nobody cared about her point of view anymore. They kept brushing her off, telling her she was wrong, actively ignoring her ideas.

And it was getting worse. They were starting to ignore her more and more, forgetting she was in the room, not calling her down for Dinner, even forgetting to check in on her during Patrol.

She knew that there must be something going on, Magical or otherwise, but when she tried bringing it up with her Dad or JLD, they would also Brush her off.

Her Family was forgetting her. And they didn't even realize it.

...

Danny was not okay at the moment.

When he had gone to school a few weeks ago and noticed everybody staring at him, he didn't give it much thought. Maybe Dash or Paulina had spread another Rumor about him again, not too out of the ordinary.

When his name had been called over the Intercom, he hadn't thought much of that either. His grades were falling even more than usual, so he assumed his Guidance Counselor wanted to have another talk with him.

When he walked into the Principals Office to see both of his Parents and some GIW Agents, that's when he realized something big must have happened.

He didn't have much of a chance to react when the Shields went up, but he did react when the first Ecto-Blast scorched the wall behind him. His Parents began to scream at him as they fired their Blasters, something about replacing somebody? He didn't know, he was pretty preoccupied at the moment.

It took more effort than he cared to admit to escape the Room, but a stray shot to the hidden Shield Projector under the Principals Desk proved to be his saving grace. Unfortunately the moment he escaped the Office, he was met with a veritable Army of GIW Agents, all armed to the Teeth with Weapons he had never even seen before.

He managed to get away for a moment, hiding in the Bathroom as the Agents chasing him passed it by. That's when he met Wes.

He obviously hadn't been expecting him, but the moment he saw him Wes put on a smug look. "Oh hi Fenton, trying to get away from the other students?"

Danny had replied with confusion, "What the hell are you talking about?!"

"I finally managed to convince everybody about you, now everyone knows that you're Phantom! I'll bet you're hiding from all of the other Students hounding you for questions right?"

"...it was you?"

"Yeah, so? I finally get to be right!"

"...You absolute MORON-"

That was the last Danny got to say to Wes before an Ecto-Blast launched him through a Wall, seeing his face morph into a look of Shock just before the dust cloud covered it up.

Since that day, Danny had been on the Run. Nowhere was safe anymore now that the GIW knew both his Human and Ghost's faces, but he had to keep running. He crossed state Lines already, and was on his way to the next Ecto-Rich City he could sense, somewhere in New Jersey.

He cursed his Fenton Luck every day. Why had everybody believed Wes this time?! Nobody had ever belived him before, nobody even seemed to acknowledge his existence after a while! What had changed?

Danny just wanted to rest already.

...

Cass had taken to Patrolling alone recently. She had taken to doing a lot of things alone, actually.

After the first month, it seemed that nobody could remember that she was in the room with them, even if she was within their eyeline, she just faded into the background. By the 2 Month Mark they had stopped talking to her entirely, although occasionally she would get a Text or two from her dad. By the 3 month Mark she was completely invisible, and By the 5th she had been forced to get used to it.

She didn't know what was going on, was it a Meta Ability? Magic? Alien Tech? She had no idea.

She had begun to cook for herself after the first time Alfred forgot to set her Plate at the Table. The same with Washing her own Clothes, Cleaning her Room, and Paying her Phone Bills. At the very least the Automated Allowance Payments to her Account had kept up, or she wouldn't have been able to go to her favorite Cafe anymore.

It was bittersweet for her. She used to go to that Cafe every week with Alfred, but he didn't even come on his own anymore. Had he only come for her? Did she really mean that much to them? It hurt, she finally had a family that cared for her and suddenly she didn't exist to them.

She sat alone at a Table, ignored by everyone in the Cafe as usual, when a new face walked in. He looked about her age, a little roughed up, walking with a sort of cautious gaint, as if he was scared of something. His Body Language seemed to agree with her assessment, as his body practically screamed "Worry" in its movements.

Cass stopped watching at that point. Just another Gotham Teen, probably worried over something like getting not having enough money or getting mugged on the way home. It was a Common sight in Gotham.

She attention was pricked again for a moment when she heard a voice speak up. "Uh, can I sit here?"

She ignored it, he wasn't talking to her.

"Um, excuse me? Miss? Could I sit here?" He repeated.

She ignored him again, he wasn't talking to her. Nobody talked to her.

"Hello? Do you have Earbuds in?" He said, and he waved his hand in front of her face.

Her face. He waved his hand. In front of Her Face.

He was talking to her.

She looked up at him sharply, seeming to startle him for a moment before he asked, "So, is that a no?"

"You can see me?" She asked.

He looked a bit bewildered, but replied "Uh, yeah? Why would I not? Are you...a Ghost?". That last part sounded a bit suspicious.

"No. Not a Ghost. But nobody sees me. Ever. Nobody remembers me." She replied. She had never spoken this much to anybody outside of her Family, but in the past few weeks she had been starved for interaction.

He seemed slightly interested, and sat down at her table. He looked her in the eyes, and said "Do you...talk about it?"

She smiled. He could see her.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 5: Flip Slip.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 4.5)