ray | 23 | any pronouns

everytime i see someone being "so obviously fucking wrong" about something online and i want to correct them, i think about this comment and it helps me remember the futility of it all. thank you u/YARGLE_IS_MY_DAD you are like the patron saint of online patience to me

i am shrunken down and brought to the gnome world and when i attempt to assimilate to their culture I use an acorn cap as a hat and they all laugh cheerfully at my silly mistake of wearing what they use as a bowl like a cap and though this is a transgression that would have humiliated me in my human life I am instead laughing alongside them at my humorous misunderstanding

they ask me what I would like to eat and knowing that gnomes enjoy fruit i ask for my favorite fruit, an apple, and they all laugh raucously and say that i must be very hungry indeed to desire an entire apple rather than just a small chunk, and i go along with their joke and say that while my body may have shrank my stomach has not! and they all guffaw with delight until their faces turn red and see that my request is met and we all sit around a toadstool and share many apple slices together

over my time spent with the gnomes, my antics are still regarded with much delight. though i am past the age in which i am confused by their customs and norms, i occasionally pretend to be clueless about simple and easily understood things, such as shock at how toads are as tall as I am. they all continue to laugh at my feigned surprise, and sometimes join in, asking me if I need any help distinguishing what berries are for eating and which are for painting. i laugh, too. there is a sense of grace that comes with my shortcomings amongst the gnomes. they are entertained by my misunderstandings, yes, because life is to short to not be jolly.

i wake up one morning back at my original size. the small cavern in the roots of a tree that i lived in is destroyed in my sleep. my clothes, tailored from cut-up scraps of fabric, are shredded around me. i am a human again. i am horribly embarrassed.

the gnomes of the community gather around where i sit, all looking at me and exchanging glances with each other, none of them speaking the obvious. i can no longer stay here, now that i am not their size. but i was part of their community. i became one of them, indistinguishable from these people only from my past. how am i supposed to return to the world of the humans now? there is no life left for me there. that is not a life where i may fish for minnows in a babbling brook and feast off a bounty of raspberries. i am distraught. i cry.

my community comforts me. friends, all minuscule to me now, pat me wherever they can reach, nimbly dodging the tears that fall from my face. one of them offers me water. they don't have any containers that are big enough for me, they apologize, so just this acorn cap filled with morning dew will have to suffice.

i take the acorn cap and look at it in my hands. it is so small now. with a sniff, i put it atop my head.

the gnome chuckles. then laughs. then bends at the waist, bellowing with laughter, supporting himself on my knee. then i am laughing too, face red, tears still falling, and my community of gnomes laughs with me as well, so loud that a flock of birds takes off in the distance, and i am still laughing even as i stand to my feet and lumber away, back to where i once came.

honey-nut clarity

post-nut cheerios

At a time when students and activists around the world are demanding a boycott of Israeli products, services and institutions, the universities below have taken the cash – some of them twice:

The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement has described Israeli universities as working closely with the Israeli state to develop weapons and systems that can be used to oppress and kill Palestinians:

Insisting that there's only one good MCU film can be a much more effective way of winding up MCU fans than insisting that they all suck, but you've gotta pick the right one. If you claim Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the only good MCU film, they'll probably just be like "I disagree, but I can understand how you'd feel that way"; if you insist with a straight face that Thor: The Dark World is the only good MCU film you can get them to write entire essays about how wrong you are.

Saying "I never liked any MCU film until 'Captain Marvel' came out" is like a setting off a discourse bomb

"I was only really able to get into them after they killed off that awful Tony Stark guy"

the paris catacombs are 1000x more fucked up than i imagined

did you know the cops once found a fully functioning movie theater with a well-stocked bar inside the catacombs and they when they tried to go back later to formally investigate it was completely emptied out save for a note that read "don't search for us"

crying

-- African Artists Against Apartheid, photos by Alaa Daraghme, 10 Jan 2024

-- "Palestinians celebrate South Africa in Ramallah rally" by Linah Alsaafin and Brian Osgood, 10 Jan 2024 16:30 GMT

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

Seeing as Twitter is gonna legally steal your work now, please use glaze to protect what you make.

Guys did you hear about Nightshade?

Using both Glaze and Nightshade would corrupt the generation of pictures mimicking artist AND mess with the AI's recognition of what everything is. Like it would generate a dog when you ask for a cat.

And it would be hell for AI bros to remove the cloaked pictures from their database ʕ 👀人ʔ

has this one been done yet

from al jazeeras live reporting of the first ICJ hearing, 11 Jan 2024

someone in the tags on one of my posts about the ICJ case said "this is all a farce," and I agree that the ICJ is enmeshed with western imperialism and that the UN doesn't seem to be capable of much beyond political theater, but I think dismissing the entire case is incredibly disrespectful to South Africa's legal team, and to the Palestinians they're intervening on behalf of, who have a right to have their oppressors charged in every single court with jurisdiction, regardless of how we feel about those courts. the UN itself may be a joke but I didn't see anything farcical about the way South Africa's team presented their case. this trial is unprecedented in the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle and regardless of how the court rules, it's going to expose both the incontrovertible proof of genocide and the failure of western legal and governmental bodies to prevent it, and that will have repercussions

Very pleased with the effort by the South African team. I'm too scared to hope that anything effectual will come of this, but it's important that there was a cohesive, honest, and powerful argument and timeline with extensive documentation put forth to the world, even if the world rejects it. The last couple of months were a whole lot of passive voice and insultingly vague headlines that it's truly a comfort to see a straightforward accusation.

If we lose this case then it is proof that the world does not care about justice. It will be proof that the United Nations is useless and a failure. It will be proof that humanity has lost its sense of moral right and wrong. There nothing that can justify any action committed against the people of Palestinian over the past 96 day and nearly 76 years of occupation.

May Allah protect us all

Update: The South African lawyers have sent a notice to the US government stating that they aim to hold the US accountable for their aiding, abetting and supporting Israel in international crimes against Palestinians.

I'm so proud to be South African rn and I'm so proud of the team representing us.

Here is a masterlist of every single genocidal statement made by the State of Israel, all appropriately quoted and sourced.

These statements cannot be retracted.

Quote from the Israeli State Minister of Agriculture and Development.

And yet, Zionists will tell you that “This is not a genocide, Hamas are using Palestinians as human shields!”

they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary

When their entire relationship is toxic, but they're both so fucked up that it's actually the best case scenario, because subjecting anybody else to either of them would be a human rights violation.

My friend is telling me about guy he dated who was some hyper credentialed expert in nuclear science and was constantly getting turned down for jobs and people told him hey it’s probably your very explicit sex/kink Instagram publicly available under your real name and he said yeah probably but this is how I want to live my life

king

there's a post where someone said "can you respect trans women who look like men" and someone responded something like "hell yeah I love people who fuck with gender!" and like... yeah that's cool, but in a lot of spaces "trans woman who looks like a man" is a lot less likely to be someone who is intentionally comfortably presenting masculine, and a lot more likely to be a girl who hasn't started transition, or can't safely, or just didn't or couldn't put in the effort to pass as fem today, and a lot of them will just look like schlubby dudes and not a radically presenting queer person. and you should be able to respect that.