Hossam Al-Qazzaz and his family were finally able to move into their newly rebuilt tent... And now, it looks likely they will be displaced yet again.

Written by @rumiandroses

In the early hours of March 17/18, 2025, the ceasefire in Gaza collapsed. Airstrikes lit up the dark night, killing over 400 people.

Sleeping in their tent in the Khan Kunis displacement camp, the Al-Quzzaz family had a nightmarish awakening: their tent collapsing on top of them, their belongings catching fire from the blast.

Hossam, his wife Hanan, and their four children—Bashar (9), Hani (8), Diana (4), and 4-month-old Habiba—managed to scramble out of the wreckage.

Original Video: [LINK]

"Miraculously, we survived," Hossam wrote to us the next morning, assuring us he and his family were unharmed. The tent, however, was completely destroyed.

“By the grace of the Creator, we were not physically harmed, but we are psychologically and morally broken,” Hossam wrote in the March 19th update on the family's GoFundMe page. “... our hearts are still trembling until now, because we have lost everything. Our tent was completely destroyed, just as our house was destroyed before, and we are now homeless, without food, without clothes, without money…”

The devastating blow was softened a little by the kindness of others; thanks to everyone who donated to the Chuffed campaign our founder, Bethany Grace, created to help the family rebuild, we were able to send the Al-Qazzaz family $788 (€697.48 after conversion)—enough to start constructing another shelter out of sturdy materials.

Hossam, skilled in construction, has been hard at work for the past few weeks, clearing out the debris and reconstructing the family's shelter with materials he was able to obtain.

Every day, Hossam toiled to rebuild his family's shelter. And every long night, the family could barely sleep as brutal airstrikes continued to light up the night.

“The sounds of bombings are everywhere,” Hossam wrote to us one evening. “And the planes fly at a close distance. And fires everywhere.”

A few days ago, the family was able to move back into their shelter together.

But today, Hossam sent us a message that made our blood run cold:

“The tanks are approaching and are almost a kilometer* or a little more away. If [they] come any closer, we'll get out of there because we'll be within range of [their] fire.”

*Kilometer = 0.62 miles

This precious family, already displaced multiple times for over a year, now might be displaced again, under threat of fire. With no stable income and essential supplies priced beyond reach, the Al-Qazzaz family is fighting a daily battle just to keep their children warm, fed, and safe.

The Al-Qazzaz family is one of countless in Gaza enduring wave after wave of trauma, displacement, and loss. And yet, through it all, they have held onto their dignity, their love for each other, and their will to survive. The support of the online mutual aid community has been a lifeline for them—allowing them to feed their children, find temporary shelter, and begin again each time everything is taken from them.

If you are moved by their story and wish to help, the family has a GoFundMe campaign that directly supports their daily essentials—food, medicine, and immediate needs. Every donation, no matter the size, helps them meet the most basic requirements to keep going in impossible circumstances.

Additionally, a Chuffed campaign, organized by the founder of Gaza Giving Tree, is helping to raise funds specifically to aid the family in either rebuilding yet again or evacuating to safety if that becomes possible. This effort is aimed at long-term stability and survival—a future where the children can sleep without fear.

Please consider contributing to one or both campaigns. Your generosity can be the reason this family has a chance at life beyond war and rubble.

The Al-Qazzaz family's campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters and is (#287) on their list of verified campaigns.

Tagging for reach (DM to be removed)

I honestly do just presume everyone in the world has watched naruto I just can't comprehend a person that hasn't witnessed rock Lee take off his training weights or seen naruto sit sadly on a swing 50 times so when I see someone say they've never seen naruto I just don't believe them they have definitely watched naruto it is a universal life step

could you guys please stop shattering my world view

I dont know why this poll is getting so much attention but my response to it so far is just

this is all my brain got from the death of the undying episode

It absolutely cracks me up that Elisa goes on this cute seemingly innocent costume date with Goliath, but then-

She fully has a sluttier version underneath ready to GO like 😂

We Stan a monster-fucking icon

I’m mostly amused that she decided to include a thigh holster, because she knows what her life is like.

Creative writing is way closer to engineering than I think a lot of people expect. It takes creativity and imagination to decide what to write about. It takes a lot of honed dedication to craft to really make the word-to-word prose sparkle. But all the stuff in between? Knowing how long an idea should be, what medium it should be, how many characters, and how their motivations need to interact, all that shit is basically engineering.

All that plot and structure shit is the bones. I think it really trips some writers up. I think it's why writing a novel feels like torture for poets (poor fundamentals, all schmoovement), and why half-decent essayists can rapidly churn out slop (strong fundamentals, poor tech).

Obsessed when Pokémon cards do this.

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

AO3 site skins were briefly broken as a result of some recent maintenance. Everything should be working again now, but if you are still having trouble with your skin, or the Archive looks weird to you, please try:

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Posted: 00:41 UTC 25 April, 2025

one of the more bleak things to acknowledge is that if you pirate literally all of your music and then set aside a spotify subscription's worth of money each month to spend on a single pay-what-you-want album, it would almost immediately amount to you supporting those musicians more than streaming does

pirating all of your music and then buying a hat or something four times a year still makes you pull significantly ahead of the person who streams thousands of songs every year. it's not really a fair or good system for anyone

What a good post to reblog on bandcamp friday. Remember that any money you spend on albums on bandcamp today goes 100% to the artist.

I saw a lot of people reblogging this with my addition two days ago and now I'm afraid some of them might have thought it was bandcamp friday that day lol. So for anyone with post timestamps turned off: I made that addition on Friday March 7th 2025. Bandcamp fridays always fall on the first friday of the month (when they do them) so the next one should fall on April 4th

The next Bandcamp Friday is on May 2nd, 2025! You can use this page to check how long until the next one :3

The remaining ones this year are:

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

#they really said “you can’t use wiki as an academic source-use our garbage AI that’s even less reliable”#and you can’t even opt out of it

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

there are ALWAYS ways around stuff. it's just a matter of looking into it and asking around

I'M FREE

FOR WIKIPEDIA!!!!

it’s hard to be an immortal child :/

journey to the west is a GOOD book and you can read it FOR FREE!!!

「Day 1」 Harvest Season

I need to catch up bc I forgot this started but they're so!!!!!!!!

I can't wait to be fed content all week hehe

Fun with ChatGTP

Holy crap! I've never used it and have no intention to, but I didn't think it'd fail at something that simple.

Interestingly, spelling and math are some of the things that LLMs are noticeably bad at, when the dictionary app and basic calculator on your phone are basically perfect, specifically because of how LLMs function.

Unless you do some prompt engineering (like asking it to actually run some python code to act as a calculator), LLMs view all words and numbers as solid blocks or tokens, not as individual numbers and letters that are put together. So it all comes down to what's in the training data. Detailed web pages for commonly spelled words and basic math problems will cover some bases, but ask it about a word that rarely shows up on spelling tests or math problems (like 4 digit x 4 digit multiplication) and it will sometimes just....guess.

Because it doesn't see the letters inside of words, and it isn't actually doing computations, if that example doesn't appear in its Training data it just has to guess. It can't think. It's not a person.

Some LLM engineers are trying to improve this by building in more web searches and invisible prompt edits, but fundamentally, LLMs are not calculators or spell checkers.

the primordial serpent

Unidentified liquid

@creatures-in-posts ?

This liquid appears to be a primordial serpent

…or some other creature ?

Gengeal Week day 1: Harvest Season ☀️🌴

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

Like that story isn’t about an ugly duckling that grew up sexy, it’s a fucking swan was judged as a duck and hated itself as a duck until it found out it wasn’t a duck and stopped trying to be a duck.

The actual ducks in the neighborhood were probably still looking around at perfectly normal swans like “damn, look at those busted ass ducks”

This is pretty important, actually. The good ending is finding the other swans, not tearing yourself to pieces trying to impress the ducks.

although a lot of adaptations skip over this and sanitise it to the point where the message is apparently meant to read "you'll be forgiven for being born wrong, if you turn out thin and white and pretty!" - there's a lot going on in the original. For one thing, most adaptations present him as a wild animal, but the Ugly Duckling is born into captivity, into a society that mimics upper-class pretensions, which is why he's declared 'ugly'. His mother is loving and very generous at first - hatching him despite the inconvenient incubation period, and defending him firmly - but after the other domestic animals (including a higher-class dominant one) point out what a burden he is, she turns on her child. Previously, she genuinely appeared to like him.

And a thing that's missed, while kid's abridged adaptations miss out on the rest of the point, is that the Ugly Duckling decides he can't live like this and leaves the farmyard; he goes into the wild himself. In the various passages in which people try to keep him as a pet, or a duck, it's hammered home again and again that this does not make a good pet. there is nothing in him that suits being a domestic animal.

one of the particular parts that makes you go "sweet jesus, hans christian andersen" is where the wild geese rock up and are nice to the young swan, not quite recognising him as a swan but saying they're pretty into whatever weird vibe he has (is this a sort of queer recognition thing? we are told, explicitly, that the wild geese are both male, and they definitely say "you're so ugly it's hot - come with us" - given HCA, it might be) and then they're, you know, instantly shot dead. Because that's what happens to wild geese. They like your vibe and try to take you with them, and even offer to teach you how to flirt - and then you see exactly what happens to them. And then every encounter from there, from the old woman who attempts to keep him - a very satirical and funny passage - to the young family who genuinely attempt to save his life (but he's too fundamentally panicked and awkward to reciprocate their kindness, and explodes out of their house in a social catastrophe) the story hammers in: not only are you a terrible duck, but you just aren't MEANT to live with people. You're closer to the things they kill than the things they keep.

but yeah, adaptations miss this often: you have to go out into the wild to save your own life. you may die in the wild, and you WILL die where you are. nobody comes to save you - and nobody really could have, when you were younger - but ultimately, mate, you just aren't a very good pet. Of the list of "attributes of a domestic animal" you really suck, in detail, at all of them.

so it's very telling to me that the good ending is the one where he is a wild animal - but more importantly, a WILD SWAN.

Not killed. (like a wild goose).

Not kept. (like a duck).

but a secret third thing, that swans - of few creatures - get. they get admired and they get paid and they get LEFT ALONE. they have a position in relation to humanity, and it is BEING A LOVELY SWAN OVER THERE.

what a thing for a lonely heart to yearn for!