Changewinds' Ink

As a Jew I wholeheartedly believe that, folks who are pretending nothing is wrong and Palestinians aren't being murdered every day would have absolutely ignored the Holocaust and let my folks get killed without blinking an eye.

Americans have a lot of heroic fantasies about what they would have done during the Holocaust or chattel slavery, and the answer for a lot of them is absolutely nothing. They would have complained about the people actually doing things for being too disruptive. We Jews did the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and they would have called this terrorism. They would have also complained about MLK and Malcolm X, the former of which took the economies of entire cities hostage. Modern day disruptions don't hold a candle to historical disruptions.

In a two of more decades, people are going to use excuses like "I didn't know!" or pretend they were supportive all along, making tear jerking films about the Palestinian plight. We need to not let them do this.

I'm also not asking people to be action heroes or anything, since it takes a very specific kind of person to do that sort of direct resistance. I'm asking for people to actually acknowledge and discuss the fact that there is a genocide going on, and to not pretend things are fine. (This applies to all social justice struggles. Acknowledgement helps normal conversations about it, and de-normalize the ignoring of it like we do for many social problems.)

Also there are many ways to support efforts for justice! The people doing direct action require people to support with costs, food, care supplies, etc. For everyone in a visible position, there are a lot of folks cooking as well.

the pride discourse is absolutely rancid this year, i have seen with my own two eyes so far

#you guys are getting played so hard by the republican wing who want to throw all homosexuals into a canyon

I will say it again:

Kids are horny. Kids will be horny no matter what. Teach them to have safe sex with other kids that they know and trust and want to have sex with, not with their weird boyfriend who keeps saying “But you said you love me, so this should be fine, right?”

Teach them consent is important. That they can say no halfway through. That if your partner says no halfway through, you have to stop and respect that and understand that doesn’t mean they hate you.

For fuck’s sake “abstinence” hasn’t helped anyone. Teach kids about sex and keep them safe.

But also, some kids just aren’t horny, and we should also tell those kids they aren’t broken and their boundaries and consent matter just as much as for their peers who are horny.

All of this is true.

The important parts are:

1) All kids should know the actual truth about how sex works before they reach the age where they can become pregnant or make someone else pregnant. The number of people who end up dealing with a pregnancy before they learn how that happens is unfortunately not zero.

2) All kids should know how best to protect against possible unwanted consequences of sex, like pregnancy and disease. They should be taught how to prepare, and they should also be taught what to do if they forget to prepare protection, the protection fails, or G-d forbid, they are assaulted. Plan B and post-exposure prophylaxis are things that they should be able to get if needed.

3) All kids should know that some people naturally become horny when their hormones get going, some people take a while to get there, and some people NEVER EVER get horny, and all of this is OK and fine and 100% normal for humans.

4) All kids should be taught–from birth onward–that they never have to let anyone touch them without their consent, and they are not allowed to touch other people without their consent. Yes this means you can’t spank your kids; yes this means you can’t make them kiss Grandma if they don’t want to; yes this means that you can’t act like unwanted pursuit of another child is cute because they’re 5, because in 10 years it will not be cute at all.  It might even mean long discussions about why we agree to let doctors do things to us that hurt sometimes, and this is a pain in the ass, but sometimes good parenting is going to be a pain in the ass.

As someone abused by doctors as a child and an adult, it’s super important to teach your child that consent applies to doctors too. Consent applies to all authority figures. Teaching kids that no one can touch them without their consent except for certain people with extra power over them is setting them up to think abuse from authority is normal and something they’re supposed to put up with.

Your body belongs to you, someone who is supposed to help you take care of your body does not have the right to coerce you

Hey :)

1000 free brushes ok? (these r all from adobes site, if you don’t wanna bother getting a photoshop trial to download through that you can get em here, they can be imported into csp+procreate too since those programs support ABRs.) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19AwplB13T7k2ZqYipz0B4Pqygn8pIqJO

On this year women's day, all we could think about are Palestinian women in Gaza.

Nearly 9,000 women have been killed in Israeli attacks in five months. Another 2,100 are missing and presumed dead, while 23,000 have been wounded and over half a million are displaced.

“Palestinian women, especially in the Gaza Strip, are exposed to the worst humanitarian catastrophe,” Ashraf al-Qudra, the health ministry’s spokesperson, said on Thursday.

Dozens of women and girls have also been detained and face harsh conditions in Israeli custody, including sexual abuse.

Women in Gaza also struggle to find menstruation products and access the necessary pregnancy and post-natal care. The consequences on reproductive health, including a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births, have increased significantly.

Women in labour are undergoing caesarean procedures without anaesthetics, and a shortage of post-operative care such as medication, antibiotics and pain relief further exacerbates the situation.

According to the health ministry, 5,000 women give birth monthly in Gaza under “harsh, unsafe and unhealthy” conditions caused by Israeli bombing and displacement.

There are 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza suffering from “malnutrition, dehydration and lack of medical care.

There have also been repeated cases of Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian women by posting videos and pictures of themselves rummaging through personal belongings in Gaza homes, making derogatory comments and posing with women’s underwear.

And I just got confirmation from a second ex-colleague that a deal with midjourney has been brewing since months ago. Not any extra details, just that's a real thing.

Shit, I don't see any way for this to happen that doesn't make it an apocalyptic event the size of the porn ban. Fuck.

Shit. This may be pure chance and coincidence, and it's not he is in a position to be able to talk about anything, but seeing prominent staff members announcing they are moving their original photography out of tumblr just two weeks ago seems a pretty significant cue of shit to be about to hit the fan.

D: I suppose it's inevitable, as every T&C probably gives rights to every "free" site we post on the rights to use our data this way, but it is still awful to know that a relatively open platform will go the same way as every other social media platform and sell your data. Maybe it's time to Glaze every piece at least.

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

Past extinct ecosystems are so fascinating and alien to us, especially for only having whispers of what was there through fossil records.

They are carpet bombing Rafah. The over 1.4 million Palestinians in Rafah are being targeted at what is now 4 in the morning for them. They are posting their goodbyes.

It does get harder not to call it genocide when the Israeli government told Gaza Palestinians to move to the south if they didn't want to be bombed. And then, bombed 1.5 million people and called it a victory when they rescued 2 hostages. This after "accidentally" killing hostages earlier in the war.

I realize it's a giant tangle of foreign policy and there are many reasons (internally, future prospects, past guilt) why the US supports Israel wholeheartedly without question, but as a country, we got so angry at Saudi Arabia killing Jamaal Khashoggi, but here, where apparently, in a war where the highest numbers of journalists are being killed, the US is saying nothing publicly besides a gentle plea for Israel to please not kill the civilians.

And yet, we also see this creating a precedent, where if Israel is allowed to commit these war crimes with impunity, Russia would be happy to do the same to Ukraine and China to Taiwan.

And it's that whole ridiculous Skittles argument again. Can't trust anyone if one of those Palestinians might be a Hamas fighter, but as any insurgent expert would tell you, killing women, children, journalists, and starving a population is just going to create a bigger population of people that resent you with more people that might consider that they have nothing to live for but violence or vengance.

Strange roadside buildings where you shouldn’t ever go.

Loving the aesthetic. Only little niggle is the perfect spots of the stars is a bit distracting.

addendums: cult classic tv overlaps with early supernatural seasons somewhat, i am aware, just choose based on the cultural context in which you read your first fic.

for weeaboo crew i was thinking of examples like hetalia, black butler, soul eater, etc--popular anime absolutely included but the distinction is that people who were into dragon ball weren't necessarily going to anime club every week and making deviantart stamps about yaoi, but people into ouran high school host club ABSOLUTELY were.

homestuck is in its own category because homestuck changed fandom forever at a critical time which just happened to be when i was growing up in fandom. harry potter, lotr, star wars, and twilight are in their own categories because they were such multimedia juggernauts they had entire archives dedicated solely and only to their fic that spanned multiple franchise reboots (books -> movies -> extended universes). (i acknowledge star trek technically would fit under this but at the time culturally it had more overlap with other cult classic tv fandoms.)

honorable mentions that didn't make it to the list because i had to pick-and-choose with the 12 answer limit: the final fantasy franchise (axed because i am not familiar enough with the fic scene to know if it was as iconic of a gateway drug as, like, naruto or twilight or star wars fic), a general YA lit category (YA lit outside of twilight only went mainstream slightly after this time period), the MCU (i have a hate boner for the MCU), a broader "american superhero comics" category (this would be valid as an option but i don't have the space)

hello!

People & countries mentioned in the thread:

Ongoing Edits: more from the notes / me

Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.

Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.

I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.

Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.

These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.

(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)

Yup.

I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.

Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.

And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.

yall r gonna post a man's entire portfolio of art and not give credit?

anyways these images are by mark ferrari, a color cycling pixel art master, you can check them out in their html color cycling forms, with sound effects and ability to change the time of day of the image, here and here

fiction

❥ Against the Loveless World - Susan Abulhawa

*note: sexual violence mention

❥ A Woman is No Man - Etaf Rum

❥ Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands - Sonia Nimr

❥ Salt Houses - Hala Alyan

❥ Minor Detail - Adania Shibli

*note: sexual violence mention

❥ The Parisian - Isabella Hammad

❥ My First and Only Love - Sahar Khalifeh

non-fiction

❥ The Question of Palestine - Edward Said

❥ I Saw Ramallah - Mourid Barghouti

❥ The Hundred Years' War on Palestine - Rashid Khalidi

❥ The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappé

Poetry

❥ The Butterfly’s Burden - Mahmoud Darwish

❥ Poems of Palestine - multiple writers, curated by Fady Joudah & Lena Tuffaha

❥ Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear - Mosab Abu Toha

these books are a wonderful way for you to educate yourself on the palestinian identity, their history, their voices and their stories. instead of hearing about the palestinians from the media, why not read what they say from their own hearts? understand them in their purest form.

you may find these books on amazon or your local bookstore. and can probably find e-book pdfs online for free if you search.

happy reading! 💛

the unexpected joy of the worst summer of our lives by christine mi for vox