anyone remember what these things are called like little cartoony expressive doohickies i think they have a real name but i can’t remember

im not fucking crazy.

if i have one more person say sparkles on this post im gonna blow i swear to god

They're squeans I'm pretty sure! If they pop like that anyway. But the term for this kind of "symbol to refer to the general vibe of something in art" is called "Emanata" because it emanates from a person or object.

what the fuck. comics are magic

Please read this as if i were a member of your family. Maybe your sister, your daughter or your friend. As if my family who is going through difficult circumstances is your family.

Hello, I'm Ola, a graduate student from the faculty of science - Al-Azhar University in G@za P@lestine. I truly appreciate you taking a moment to read my story. As you reading my message, myself and my family, “my mother, father, three sisters, and my little brother,” are trying to survive under all kinds of suffering including but not limited to fear, instability, and starvation, thirst, and poverty in northern G@za.

After 508 days of suffering, I am writing to you today with a heavy heart, in desperate need of your help. I can't describe how harsh the situation we are living in is. My family is suffering from the biting cold of winter, and we are facing a severe shortage of food and clothing. Every day feels like a lifetime, and every moment makes me feel helpless and hopeless. 💔

After the prices went up so crazy, I created this campaign to help my family provide food, water and essential needs. I know for sure that you can't help all families that want your help but at least you can help those who come across your life.

Every simple thing makes a difference in changing the situation we are in. So please don't hesitate to help us 🙏💔

It's your time to help and make a difference, Will you?!

Thank you for taking a minute to read this.♥️

My campaign has been vetted by:

@90-ghost here, @northgazaupdates here, and @el-shab-hussien and @nabulsi 's spreadsheet of vetted campaigns #205.

Please share my post:

@ot3 @amygdalae @turian @dykesbat @guldaastan @ashwantsafreepalestine @communistchameleon @komsomolka @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @heritageposts @watermotif @mavigator @lacecap @determinate-negation @deepspaceboytoy @paper-mario-wiki @kibumkim @chilewithcarnage @sayruq @turtletoria @vampiricvenus @ghostofanonpast @akajustmerry @mahoushojoe @sar-soor @rhubarbspring @catcrumb @imogen-mangle @soon-palestine @acepumpkinpatrick @gothhabiba @tamamita @taqoou @wolfertinger666 @prisonhannibal @nyancrimew @idontmindifuforgetme

time sensitive: trans girl needs to escape an abusive ex..... Hi everyone, I created this account specifically to crowdfund since my situation is dangerous & I don't want it attached to my socials. If you want more information before donating, you can reach out to me in DMs and I'll provide it. I thought my bf and I had something good but his anger issues have taken a new turn since I lost my job. It's come to the point that he is threatening me nearly daily. Today when I found out he hid my gender-affirming clothes & estrogen, I knew it was the last straw. I'm just raising enough that I can leave. I know where to go, but he's essentially "trapping" me since he needs the car for work. I plan to call an uber and go from there. Get a motel, etc. Thank you so much for taking the time to read. Here is my fundraiser.

thanks again to everyone who is sharing this. even if you can't donate, getting eyes on it helps. thanks!!

it’s interesting how many people say the term “nonbinary” as short for an identity with the assumption that this is separate and contradictory with a transfem identity, ppl so used to and centered around transmascs that they forget there’s other nonbinary people. like once you realize how many people implicitly see nonbinary gender as transmasculine by default it’s impossible to stop noticing it

This may be orthogonal to the original point, but as a third-world transfem who's rather embroiled in the queer scholarship that eventually trickles down into Tumblr and popular queer discourse, there's something very particularly galling about how "non-binary" identity is treated.

Y'all have probably noticed this too. Historians will say that it's ahistorical to impose "modern categories" of gender and sexuality onto the past, so definitively stating that someone was "trans" or "bisexual" is a big no-no. Similarly, you'll encounter arguments about how imposing "Western categories" of "gayness" or "transness" onto other cultures is "cultural imperialism".

Which ... alright, there is a logic there, even if I take issue with it. However, one thing I've noticed? That selfsame scholarships has no issue with using the term, "culturally recognized non-binary identities" to refer to constructions like third-sexes, or even something that is clearly contextually more or less "gay male bottom".

And that's just so fucking weird?

Scholarship like this is also very emphatic about how "the gender binary" is a "Western, colonialist construct" (which is again a disputable claim, but let's roll with it). In fact, the legibility of "non-binary" as an identity is quite rooted in the modern, anglophonic, Western queer context, and its percolation outside those contexts is rather uncommon.

Yet, the very same fields and scholars that would say "calling a third-gendered person 'trans' is imperialism" have absolutely no issue describing that very third-gendered person as non-binary, irrespective of whether or not "non-binary" is a particularly meaningful concept in that culture!

I don't know chat, there's something interesting going on here, for those willing to critically think about the Western constructions of "non-binary" :)

(Also, just wanted to ask ... has any queer person ever been called "AC/DC"?!)

In the West, transfems can't be non-binary. Outside the West, transfems have to be considered non-binary.

Transfemininity must simultaneously be old and new: old as a marker of an unsettled cultural past prior to proper binary gender, new as a grim herald of a postmodern global consumer gender, the “asphalt spawn of the metropolis.” In the former case, transfemininity is communalized and made a living past; in the latter it is individualized and made a horrific global future of hyper-public women.

You can see this happen on a global scale, as in Talia’s example, but it can also happen on a national level: the Indonesian *waria* is maybe the best case of this, as a nu-transfeminized term that grew out of postcolonial city migration in the 60s, and which has now been progressively indigenized and demedicalized to compare to “transpuan” or “transgender.”

Academics maintain these future // past distictions via twinned separations of urban // rural, medicalized // untainted, global // national-cultural, pornographic ritual // spiritual ritual, hypersexualization // desexualization, binary // nonbinary. These range from oversimplifications to outright lies, and mean that academic theory generally struggles to understand medicalization, city-ness, and sex work in “past” groups, and struggles with cultural influence and community formation in “future” groups.

Plus, it's a little ...

Mahmoud Darwish, “On Hope,” trans. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb, in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance

I've said this before but even the idea that "the fae", as in the fairy spirits from European myth, also exist in North American forests, has some very awful implications

Colonization. That's the implication.

It's a kind of cultural colonization, that the land is so similar to Europe, and the native people are so extinct (they aren't) that why it wouldn't have fairies and gnomes and such?

I was going to say that there is also a play of similarities between European and North American temperate forests. They broadly share similar flora (pines, oaks, beeches) and fauna (foxes, badgers, wolves) because of the interactions between the Palearctic and Nearctic biogeographical realms, it's not hard to see similarities.

At the same time, it also isn't just because of this. The US South, for instance, has a subtropical climate with unique flora and fauna similar to that of South America, which has been gradually pushed away (I don't recall the exact papers that talk about this, but for example, recall the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet) by an homogeneization of agriculture and forestry.

This also isn't a phenomenon only in the US but in the entire American continent. In Argentina for example, European flora and fauna and climate were and are still considered desirable in contrast to native ones, with the corresponding implications. I am also aware of similar things in other countries. The truth is that America (the continent) is probably the part of the world most thoroughly and brutally colonized, and this is reflected on its ecology like few other places.

i wanna add something small to this that i think adds another interesting layer: there were no earthworms in North America until like 1600.

earthworms are incredibly important engineers of ecosystems. they reproduce quickly and are ravenous consumers. theyre basically just digestive systems that eat most anything organic thats in front of them. primarily, this means leaf litter and soil. before 1600, North American forests had a lot more leaf litter laying around. this provided habitats for small bugs, which in turn fed larger bugs and birds. that leaf litter also provided nutrients to shrubs and trees, who had adapted to rely on the specific ways that persistent leaf litter cycled through the ecosystem.

then, in the early 1600s, Europeans planted themselves on the eastern seaboard, and they (completely accidentally) brought earthworms with them in the ballast of their ships. these earthworms then multiplied and spread out across the North American forest ecosystem, devouring leaf litter and soil nutrients with no competition but themselves. this basically kicked the nutrient chair out from under the North American forest ecosystem, as whole species, from trees to shrubs to bugs to birds, suddenly had to face life with a whole trophic level upended.

at the same time, Europeans were busy introducing more and more species from the Old World, perfectly adapted to earthworm ecologies, who similarly broke containment and spread out ahead of the fledgling colonial enclaves. the North American ecosystem was completely upended all across the continent, in many places centuries before Europeans actually set foot there.

all this to say, this kind of global ecological homogenization isn't just a process of active cultural modification. earthworms weren't introduced to North America to pave the way for European cultural dominance. they were introduced as a side effect of extractive colonial agriculture and trade. it is the inevitable consequence of globalizing capitalist imperialism.

not quite true. there are several families of native earthworms in north america -- but in the northern half of the continent, they were killed off by the last glaciation of the ice age. this is where invasive species of european and asian earthworms are the only earthworm, and causing such a great deal of harm to hardwood forests and other ecosystems.

introduced worms are also pushing out a lot of the native NorAm worms where they are still found, which is its own problem.

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

Some highlights:

That's got to be the funniest graph ever published in a paper

the fencing scene that was cut from withnail and i, 1986

There are a lot of really dog shit things in the world of tech that can be solved with a bit of time, some stubborn googling and maybe some special hardware and piracy is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Printers are notorious for claiming they’re out of ink when they haven’t come close to the suggested number of prints, and their cartridges literally still have ink in them. So after a bit of googling I found out how to ‘reset’ a cartridges automatic stopping system (its literally 1 physical wheel on the cartridge that you gotta turn back). The only downside is that I don’t get a digital ink monitor, but since it told me it was empty when still half full, I don’t mind. 

Like, you can just jiggle with some shit and solve one of the biggest money making scams in the post-industrial world and I don’t think people realise its that easy. 

Or, like, repairing your own technology. A few months ago, I swapped out my sister’s laptop screen. Did it myself, I removed maybe 4 screws, no vital parts were exposed and it cost me $40. I even got a choice of matte or glossy. 

My point is, any walls that capitalist technology presents you with will be a false one. And one already broken by a dedicated community of interesting people working hard for free to break down that wall.

kids these days will be all “be gay do crime” and dont even know how to watch a cartoon without paying for it smh

IN FAIRNESS

piracy was definitely leagues easier a decade or so ago when thepiratebay was functional, megaupload was still running, and YouTube and Google made only the most cursory attempts to block copyright content. like let’s not pretend that the internet hasn’t got a lot more corporatised in the past decade or so. piracy is still possible and you can and should do it but it’s a LOT harder to do safely and reliably than it was.

^thank u

Sorry, this is all wrong.

1) ThePirateBay is still functional. (It’s not the same pirate bay that it was back in the day, but let’s not get into Theseus’ ship territory. It’s still here and it still works, that’s all that matters.) There are plenty of torrent sites around, more than there were 10 years ago – although overall traffic has plummeted. Now as then, it’s a whack-a-mole game.

2) Why was it “leagues easier” a decade ago? Some countries, not all (not north America, for example), now mandate ISP blocking of torrent sites, but this new complication can be bypassed with one (1) step: a google duckduckgo search for proxies. No government agency or ISP can possibly keep up with proxies, it’s yet another whack-a-mole game. So yes, it was technically easier before, but I don’t see “leagues” anywhere.

3) It was safer before? Are you shitting me? Have you lot forgotten that the legal departments of MPAA and RIAA sued torrent sharers (not even uploaders) and asked for millions of dollars for damages? AND GOT THEM? (By which I mean they didn’t actually get millions since the people they sued didn’t have any, but said people were convicted and ruined and that was the goal in the first place. It was a deeply amoral and cynical scare tactic.) Well they stopped doing that at some point, and focused on hunting P2P and torrent sites. Running a site is certainly less safe today. Using one, though? Depending on where you are, the ISP may be allowed to block you after repeated instances, and that’s it. You’re not getting in trouble with the law or into crippling debt. And either way there’s only a minuscule chance that any of this will come to pass, which becomes zero (0) with a VPN. (Safety of course depends on the country, and in some cases piracy is the least of your concerns. Let’s not get into that.)

4) Ten years ago there was no Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis was in its infancy. If today it’s harder to find PDFs on google, it is orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to find them elsewhere. People just have to unstick their minds from the notion that stuff is either on google or doesn’t exist at all. Geez.

5) P2P still exists. IRC (the sharing channels in particular, #bookz and the like) still exists. Torrenting functions like it always did. All these methods are exactly as easy to use as before, i.e. not necessarily a piece of cake, there’s a learning curve. But it’s the same learning curve it was 10 years ago.

6) So what have we lost? Only YouTube (meh, the film/tv quality was appalling anyway, and music is still there) and direct downloads (at least the permanent ones: there are plenty of them still around, but files expire and you need to keep track of what goes up when. So this goes beyond knowhow, it’s about internet communities. Let’s not get into that either, it’s a huge subject.) It’s a loss, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a terrible blow.

7) And in exchange for that loss, we got streaming sites. This is piracy, too, and it’s much much easier than torrents, and tons of people do it. Any “piracy has declined” narrative either implies that we’re excluding streaming from the discussion for some reason, or is flat out wrong. Ten years ago, grandpa couldn’t possibly torrent a film, and it’s debatable if he even knew how to open the file you helpfully sent him. Now, as long as someone has set up kodi or similar, grandpa can watch it on his tv and it just feels like cable.

8) On why torrents in particular have declined in recent years, see here. It’s a big subject and I didn’t cover all of it, but the main reason is that people had access to easier methods to get what they wanted (some legal and affordable, some illegal and free), so they didn’t need to learn how to torrent. Ergo, they never did. There’s more of course, and there’s definitely a cultural shift too, but that’s a very long story so let’s not get into it. The linked post also includes some thoughts on why torrents aren’t dead and doomed just yet, and ooh, I forgot a very important one: you can’t stream photoshop.

To summarise, internet piracy is NOT more difficult, unreliable, and unsafe today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For reasons why people (young or otherwise) seem less versed in it, please look elsewhere. I have thoughts on that too, but this is already a very long post, so I’ll just leave you with the best kind of thought. I’ll leave you with a doubt:

ARE people less versed in piracy? Are they really? Or is it simply that 20 years ago, internet users were computer geeks by definition, whereas now everyone’s online? Perhaps the percentage of skilled pirates in the general population remains more or less the same, and the only thing that’s dropped is the percentage of skilled pirates to total internet users. I can’t be sure without statistical evidence, but it’s a possibility.

You can literally google “watch _____ free online” and find most movies but the third result just download Adblock or popup blocker and you’re golden it truly couldn’t be easier

I’ve been meaning to make a piracy masterpost for awhile and what better time than now?

Materpost: A curated Githup tutorial of links to more torrent sites, software, VPNs, uBlock origin filters, ect. Basically everything you could ever want starting out. Do be warned though it doesn’t appear to have been updated in awhile so a few of the links are dead.

GAMES:

Books:

Streaming:

Computer software:

Other:

Finally someone actually posted links instead of just bitching or saying “it’s easy”

Ok just want to plug the eye a bit more considering I lost a few hours in their yesterday.

the eye has been up since 2017 and in the last four years have accumulated 140TB of data (according to their own reports). Part of their growth is just their own work, part of it is absorbing other archives/open directories that were having issues: I know rpg.rem.uz used to be its own archive - gave way to The Trove, which is having its own issues right now unfortunately… - but now most-all of their content can also just be found on the eye. Same with a few dozen other archives.

And they have ‘old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect’, but massively more than you might think just based off how this sounds. Like…

They have it all.

If you want to try and homebrew alcohol, go check their stuff. If you want to try and read books that are out of print or otherwise in public domain (and some that aren’t yet in public domain), go check their stuff. If you want to run a campaign and can’t pay for expensive print tabletop books, go check their stuff. If you want to fuck off into the woods to live off the land (or research how that would work for a writing project), go check their stuff. If you’re trying to learn shit about drugs - any drugs, almost - go check their stuff.

Hell, if you want to go read what looks like literally every research paper on coronaviruses from 1968 up to Feb 2020, you can do that too!

As chickenmcnuggies said its a mess and a half to navigate through their collections, partially with how large it is and the fact quite a few folders were once whole other archives since absorbed by the eye…

But goddamn you can lose an afternoon just going through all the stuff they have.

The subreddit r/freemediaheckyeah is a great resource and their index: https://fmhy.net/ has A LOT of stuff with a pretty straightforward UI. Its got free resources for pretty much anything you could want on the internet, both fully legal and dubiously legal.

There's this interesting phenomenon where when you're a child, or some other vulnerable minority dependent on a job for shelter, you are actually under duress almost constantly. You can't say "I don't want to work today," you cannot say "I don't want to do the dishes, actually," you cannot choose not to participate. In a lot of cases, the punishment is explicit. Your parents might yell at you. Your boss might fire you. But in other cases, it's implicit. The mood will sour. You lose leeway. People get mad at you. And that creates a really shitty environment where you're constantly being coerced to do things!

And here's the kicker; you're not allowed to acknowledge that. You cannot acknowledge that you are being coerced, you cannot acknowledge that your free will is not being respected, because that's punished too. Your boss insists that you act excited. Your parents punish you for acting surly. You are forced to fake enthusiastic consent, constantly. It's a fucking nightmare. Your hand is being forced, you do not have the option to say "no," and if you ever, for a second, try to acknowledge that, everyone acts like you're the aggressor.

I think we need to do something about the fact that every western book cover that’s released since 2019 is ugly as sin

We need to put a leashed anime girl on your liberated queer erotica cover STAT this lineless sludge is not doing it

August 20, 2024 - If you want to help out the activists who have been physically interrupting the flow of weapons to the fascist Israeli state by attacking and occupying arms factories and businesses linked to them, you can donate to Palestine Action's Legal Defence Fund here: https://palestineaction.org/defence-fund/

If you'd rather donate to Palestinians, you could donate to one of the following groups who are directly helping out the people in Gaza: UNRWA - United Nations org providing food, medicine and shelter to refugees in Palestine Gaza Municipality - Struggling to keep Gaza livable during this genocide by trying to restore access to water and keep waste management and sewage systems working eSims for Gaza - Provide internet access to Gazans so they can keep contact with eachother and the outside world

If you've got some extra cash, nothing's stopping you from donating to all of them, of course :3

Saw this post was going around again without the second part. Please keep donating to organisations that help Palestinians directly.

Some more good options: UNICEF Gaza appeal Palestine Children's Relief Fund Palestinian Red Crescent

Palestine still needs our help!

Here's some smaller initiatives that you can donate to for those who like that sorta thing, but remember that larger orgs can usually do more with the same amount of money! (which is why I dont reblog personal fundraisers)

Dahnoun Mutual Aid

Hot meals 4 Starved Palestinian Kids in north Gaza

Gaza Emergency Water Relief

Support the Palestinian Communist Party and their Youth Union in providing relief for the people of Gaza

me seeing this book cover: ah, clearly this memoir is about a lesbian's journey to identifying as a Stone Butch ! this I am interpreting from the context clues of the title and the carabiner on the cover, a lesbian dogwhistle ! what an interesting read this will be !

what this book is about: rock climbing

well i'll be damned.

(☞ sources for German bastarda and Burgundian bastarda)

read that post blacked out and woke up with this on my computer. crazy. stay safe out there everyone

Support your local park rangers

(via three--rings)

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.