tactics

not like this is gonna be relevant in my country anytime soon or anything

Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits

Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!

is anyone else also doing ultimately fine + dying of stress + it’s not that bad + if i don’t wake up tomorrow hotter and better at every hobby its fucking over for me

Hey, oomfies! This Eid, let’s spread some more love to Gaza. Grassroots orgs there are doing incredible work despite the many limitations...getting food, meds, and shelter to families who’ve lost everything. Even a few bucks can make a real difference. Donate the cost of a coffee!

Not that it's anything new, but the "voluntary" in "voluntary migration" really drives home the utter shamelessness of the occupation.

They destroy Gazan homes, hospitals, schools, roads, universities, infrastructure, cut off their water and electricity, then when they have no choice but to escape the hell that was created for them, claim they "voluntarily" chose to leave their land behind and have no right to return.

When Nakba deniers claim that Palestinians "chose" to leave their land, remember this.

Amal's baby daughter, Mariam, has known no childhood outside of surviving this genocide. She will soon be of age to attend school. Last we spoke, she had a very close call during the most recent bombardment. If she wants to give her daughter a chance at normalcy, security, education, and a decent childhood, but those options have been taken away from Gaza, is this voluntary migration?

Mahmoud wants to continue his education. He has been able to scrape by through remote learning online, but every day it becomes harder to even find reliable internet access. Last we spoke, he was trying to pay his fees in time, so that he would be allowed to enroll in this semester. If he wants to pursue his degree, but the conditions in Gaza have made that impossible, is this voluntary migration?

Dr. Anas is a cancer patient. His physical and mental health have been obliterated by this genocide. Last we spoke, he told me that after making some recovery during the ceasefire, he's now back to square one. If he wants to live, to continue his job as a doctor, and to recover from depression, which is impossible to do during bombardment, is this voluntary migration?

Samir is severely injured, and in immediate danger of losing his leg. Last we spoke, his sister told me that the bombardment in their area are more intense than they've ever been. If Samir wants to undergo surgery to save his leg, but there are no such options in Gaza, is this voluntary migration?

Please don't abandon them like our administrations have. They shouldn't have to rely on our generosity, but they must.

Donate: Amal, Mahmoud, Anas, Samir

Vetting: Amal (#175), Mahmoud, Anas, Samir (#428)

happy april fools. please take this egg

hahahahahha………………..

youve been fooled………………by the april fools beeper……………..it was a fully grown bird the entire time…..no egg………………it tells u it hopes u hav a good april 1st

I just queued this for a year

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

This is huge: You can now buy ebooks from Bookshop.org, a website that helps boost sales to local independent bookshops!

To read an ebook purchased from Bookshop.org, you must use their own app (for a mobile device) or read it in a web browser. So, unfortunately, you can't (yet) send it to your ereader, but still, you're able to buy ebooks and also share a little bit of that profit with your local bookstore, if they're an affiliate!

Who that man

the fairy on my windshield as i go down i95 at 210km/h

you forgor!!!!!! HIS PENITS!!!

Oh my god I forgot his peanut

started watching this japanese show where they take in requests and they try to help out with whatever the request is. and in this one the guy says that when he was in middle school, he always heard the girl across the street playing her piano, and although he only met her in person a few times, listening to her play her usual song was a great comfort to him growing up, especially getting to hear her slowly get better at playing.

the guy now was an adult and taking a break from college, and began to feel really lost in life, and he kept thinking back to when he was in middle school and hearing her play the piano every day. so his request was to hear her play it again. and he and the show's crew literally go back to his old place, and miraculously the girl still lives in that same house across the street, and even more miraculously the people who currently live where he used to allow him to go back to his old room where he used to listen to her play. and they all agree to recreate his middle school memory for him.

the girl comes home from her part-time job and she plays the piano, although she tells them it's been 4 years since she's ever played and is worried she won't sound good, and the guy sits by the window, and he just listens. and like. just imagining reliving that moment when you were younger, listening to a near-stranger play a song across the street every day, feeling a little less lost because of it, and returning to that as an adult when you need it most and everyone being kind enough to let you savor it again even just for a moment... i wanted to start bawling i wont lie. this is the song she played. im going to go lie down about the humanity of it all

oohh i didnt expect this to even break 2 notes but hello! the show was called 探偵！ナイトスクープ (Detective! Knight Scoop) and if you have a vpn you can watch it on netflix. the guy did get to meet the pianist herself in person and thank her for playing such a beautiful song all those times, which is why his request was to hear her play it again.

she joked she wouldve played it for him if he had just rang her doorbell haha

Imagine a fluffy unicorn that’s bred for its wool like a sheep- once or twice a year it has to get shorn and the shearer just has to awkwardly flop and position the unicorn around without getting stabbed. Perhaps they cover the horn with a protective pool noodle

Do you see my vision???

more people need to give themselves permission to write and draw pornography

it is virtuous and necessary that you write, draw, and distribute pornography

can we start with not conflating "erotic/sexual art or writing" with pornography

no lmao

@thoughtscout "Erotica" was first coined by people wanting to get around censorship laws that would ban pornography under the legal classification of Obscenity, but would not ban romance novels, or Literature, as that was "of artistic worth" and therefore protected speech. Here is the USA Legal definition, pulled from Wikipedia, of "Obscenity":

It's important to understand that key idea, that "obscene" is a legal classification that marks something as not protected by Freedom of Speech, The Press, and Free Expression, which is the First Amendment.

There are several ethical problems with having a way to exempt something from protection, and therefore censor it. It encourages people who want to censor things to try and get them legally classed as exceptions to any Freedom of Speech laws on the books. Now, with art, there are exemptions that should exist--art that harms people in the making of it, for example, which is what Child Sexual Abuse Material is, and why we call it that. We also classify filmed evidence of murder done for the film's sake as an exception. But the way people define the word "obscenity" is extremely different depending on who you ask, and because definitions in this country are set by precedent, i.e. judges ruling on court cases, the definition of things like "obscenity" keeps changing.

In 1873, for example, the Comstock Act said that birth-control information and condoms were "obscene" and banned sending them through the mail, which meant a lot of people were cut off from being able to learn about birth control (because nobody was learning about it in school--most people at the time didn't go to school after learning basic reading skills, if that; children worked, just like their adult relatives, to support their families). Do you think a book like this one that educates about puberty and sex, including birth-control, is obscene and pornography? Well it was, at one time, and BANNED. And I don't tell you this so you can go, "Well people were backwards then, we're Enlightened now, we'd only ban the RIGHT things" People have always been people, just as wise AND just as foolish as we are now, and progress has never been a straight line.

Our point is that pornography is an important thing to make, and to fight for, and to CALL "pornography". It's important to hold the line and not let people begin to call WRITTEN and DRAWN things the same as PHOTOGRAPHED and FILMED things. For MANY DECADES, people have been trying to ban and censor pornography that has involved no one but the author or artist in the making, and is therefore HARMING no actual human beings. A photograph involves real, live, breathing human beings; a drawing involves a piece of paper and a pen and the artist.

Whatever you think is "just erotica" or even "not erotica at all" is going to be called porn and obscene by a malicious and controlling person like say Warriors For Innocence, who successfully scared LiveJournal into banning a whole lot of writing and drawing and also queer and survivor support communities and users in 2006. These same folks are behind the Purity/Anti culture on Tumblr, and members successfully lobbied to pass FOSTA-SESTA and the subsequent "Titty Ban" on any website that relies on an app. FOSTA-SESTA, btw, has made human trafficking and harm to sex workers WORSE, not better.

So you need to start fighting WITH pornographers who are fighting censorship, because the people you think are on your side about only banning and censoring "the REAL bad stuff" are going to turn around and call YOUR stuff just as bad. They're already calling queer people obscene just for existing. They are calling us child abusers again, just for breathing. I don't think you want to be on the side of that rhetoric, because it will come for you and call YOU obscene and worthy of arrest, in the end.

oh my god I thought this said Chinese. I was like "dog they have existed for thousands of years they have many forms of divination what a dog shit ask"

I think it says a lot that I didn't even question that there might be thousands of forms of cheese divination. I just figured, they prolly know what they're talking about

Lakoff / Johnson is great for realizing just how deep and systematic metaphorical use of language, but the one thing that I was disappointed in was that they work entirely in English. I really wanted to see examples cited from other languages. This leaves one wondering about whether the metaphorical systems they discuss are universals or not. My own experience of other languages is that a lot of the metaphors are the same - for example, UP IS GOOD - but some are different - for example, direction of time. They mention in passing a language where the past is in front and the future behind (without examples); additionally some languages orient time vertically. Some languages have metaphorical systems with no equivalent in English. But the topic really needs more comparative treatment.

The past-forward-future-backward language they were referring to was probably Quechua.

THE PAST IS IN FRONT and THE FUTURE IS BEHIND is more common than that. I’ve seen it in Chinese, and it even exists historically in English (before and after).

I’m only suggesting Metaphors We Live By as an intro. There’s some comparative work building on it that will help with understanding different languages. We’ve covered some of that on the show before.