I LOVE IT WHEN ENDINGS CIRCLE BACK TO THE BEGINNING!!!

I LOVE IT WHEN CHARACTERS MIRROR EACH OTHER!!!!!

I LOVE IT WHEN CHARACTERS SEAL THEIR FATES IN THEIR FIRST SCENES!!!!

I LOVE IT WHEN CHARACTERS' GREATEST TRAITS ARE ALSO WHAT DOOM THEM IN THE END!!!!!

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

The Beast that Bothers

Shout out to all the Black ppl that can no longer participate directly in the fandom they love because of the stresses of racism 👍🏾 you contain multitudes of value and I'm sorry that the color of your skin and the power of your voice makes people not want to acknowledge that.

Yes, nonblack people can reblog. I'd appreciate it, in fact, if y'all took the time to vocally support your Black friends/fans in fandom.

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

Time to drop some links again.

– https://searchmysite.net/ Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines A list of academic databases and search engines.

– https://tineye.com/ Reverse image search alternative to Google’s. Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)

Love how this suddenly became *my* fault and *Palestinians* became the obstacle to peace. As if your Israel didn't expel my family multiple times, made them refugees, destroyed their crops and seized their land, put some of them in literal concentration camps during the Nakba and continues to terrorise and kill them and steal their land to this very day. It still amazes me how you lot don't see the irony in your failed arguments that you keep shamelessly recycling.

Anyway, in an alternate reality I won't be in Jerusalem kicking it with someone who put the blame on my people while they endured a literal genocide. I would instead be in Safad with my great grandfather's goats, but you evil scum killed all of them.

"Anyways back to the shelter lol" the same shelter the Palestinians you're bombing do not have? The same shelter the Palestinians you're laying siege to do not have the ressources to build? What neighbours? The ones you've locked behind walls so you can treat them like cattle at the border crossings? So you can starve them at your own convenience? What neighbours?

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to design an OC and then it looks exactly like another character?

Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, who was a lead surgeon in Gaza and particularly at Al-Shifa hospital, is barred from entering Germany.

German forces stormed the room that the "Palestine Conference" was being held in Berlin, Germany, cutting off the electricity and video feed as Nakba survivor and researcher Salman Abu Sitta was speaking via video.

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a firsthand witness to genocide who was working in Gaza hospitals during the war and set to speak at the conference, was detained at the Berlin airport and forcibly prevented from entering the country.

It is worth noting that Germany is currently on trial at at the International Court of Justice for its military and financial support for the zionist entity's genocide, and it is one of the most repressive countries for Arab and Palestinian activism, long before October 7th.

- Resistance News Network

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

here are my policy focuses:

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

Very annoyingly I can't find the post. Some of that is covered in this post about affinity networks, but step-by-step here is how you make friends:

Some tips:

It takes forever! It can be very stressful! I do seriously recommend seeing if you can become friends with people in regularly scheduled group hangouts if you can swing it because it replicates the way we form friendships as children - frequent proximity and increasing intimacy because of time shared together - instead of the "this feels like dating" feeling of trying to make friends with people you see occasionally.

Anyway sorry that's a lot good luck.

This is incredibly helpful, holy shit.

In case it helps anyone else, I’m gonna try to add something I got from a book on social skills (it’s by Daniel Wendler, written by an autistic person who’s learned the rules for autistic people who haven’t yet, highly recommend!) on the flow of conversation.

If you’re like me, maybe you struggle with infodumping and talking too much and forgetting to ask questions. If people don’t share as enthusiastically as you without direct prompting, you’ll accidentally dominate a conversation. Don’t worry, I get it! I thought, I’ll share what I want to share and they’ll share what they want to share, easy—right?

As I’ve had to learn…nope. 95% of neurotypical people (and a lot of neurodivergent people too!) won’t feel comfortable sharing without being invited to.

So, that “natural” back-and-forth of neurotypical conversation goes something like this:

You talk for a little bit. The less you know this person, the shorter your individual “blocks” of conversation should likely be in most cases. So if you’re at small talk stage, you say maybe a sentence or two; if you know them better you can get away with more.

Then it’s on you to pass the ball back. Your job here is to communicate “hey, your turn, I’m interested”, and to give them a cue of what to talk about so they don’t feel stranded and like they have to “come up with” an answer.

Not giving any cues is where awkward silence comes from, and it’ll feel to them like you’re communicating “I want out of this conversation!” So if your conversations with people often awkwardly peter out, check if you’re giving them a cue every time you finish talking!

There are, broadly speaking, two types of cues:

They’re very direct cues, and they’re the easiest for the other person to respond to. That means that the less you know someone, the more you’ll likely rely on invitations (but not exclusively! That makes people feel interrogated. 2-3 questions in a row are fine, after that you might want to throw in an inspiration or two to break it up and be less intimidating—more on that below!)

Try to always keep invitations at the same level of intimacy as the current conversation—don’t talk about the weather and then ask where this stranger grew up and what the weather was like there. These are such direct cues that it’s inherently awkward for the other person to dodge them, so make extra sure your invitations aren’t uncomfortable.

These are more indirect cues, and a little trickier in my experience. Essentially, you want to make sure that you end your bit of the conversation with something that’s deliberately easy to respond to—avoid ending on something that’s very niche that people can’t relate to or that’s very unique to you. If you want to mention something like that, you can, but tack something more general on after as inspiration (or just end on a question). Inspirations are still cues, they’re still meant to give the other person an idea of what to respond with, otherwise the conversation will feel awkward and unwelcoming!

What the other post mentioned re: offering slightly more personal information of your own often falls under this category. For example, if you’re talking about the weather as in the first example, but you mention where you grew up and what the weather was like, that can be inspiration for the other person to also talk about where they’re from!

But, unlike with a question, if they don’t want to share that information they can usually dodge it without having to make it extremely obvious that that’s what they’re doing. They can ask you something else, or shift the topic, and it might not be super subtle but it allows plausible deniability, so they’re not forced to either a) answer a question they don’t want to, or b) expose their discomfort (which is personal in itself!)

The more you know someone, the more you’ll likely automatically rely on inspiration to keep conversation flowing. That’s because you two have context for each other, something you say might easily have a bunch of things they could use as inspiration just because of past conversations you’ve had or things you already know about each other—anything can be a cue if there’s context! But with people you don’t know well, you’re gonna want to be a bit more mindful of it.

Generally, every time you talk in a one-on-one conversation, you want to leave some kind of cue for the other person to respond to!

Don’t worry too much about it though—if they want to talk to you, they’ll deliberately look for inspiration. If you throw the ball badly, they’ll still try to run to catch it anyway! It doesn’t have to be perfect.

But the less you know someone, the less you’ll be willing to “run” (because hey, that’s a lot of mental effort for a stranger who hasn’t proven they’re worth it, for all you know they might be an asshole!) and the more intentional you want to be about giving cues and making the ball as easy as possible to catch.

I’m very much still learning to “practice what I preach” here, but thinking of it this way has helped me enormously, so perhaps it’ll help someone else too!

This is so fucking funny

The first time I remember feeling suicidally depressed because I was certain I'd never have any friends and would die alone because I didn't know how to talk to people and everyone who acted like my friend was actually doing so in order to make fun of me or get me to do things for them was when I was ten years old.

That continued on until I was eighteen and happened into a scene that was full of accepting diverse, neurodiverse, and queer people that was A) quite welcoming and B) met once a month and C) had extremely clear social rules.

Once I found that group, I got a lot better at making friends and being able to act like a normal-ish person who could do things like hold jobs and talk to my partner's relatives without immediately coming off as someone dangerously unhinged.

To this day I have problems with trusting it when people are nice to me (because it always feels like they're setting me up for a public humiliation, something that happened multiple times in my childhood and something that made me very dearly want to grow up to be Carrie) and I have problems with overwhelming new people with too much information and too-aggressive friendliness.

So this is a guide written by someone who has had to painstakingly learn from the ground up how to trust people and make friends without letting myself get too hurt too often and without scaring people away constantly by coming on too strong.

IT’S NOT OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER.

WE CAN’T STOP FIGHTING FOR A CEASEFIRE NOW... THIS IS THE MOST CRUCIAL TIME. GUYS, WE NEED TO KEEP FIGHTING... 𝙋𝙇𝙀𝘼𝙎𝙀 𝙎𝙃𝘼𝙍𝙀! 𝙒𝙀 𝙉𝙀𝙀𝘿 𝙏𝙊 𝙎𝙋𝙍𝙀𝘼𝘿 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙒𝙊𝙍𝘿." from Huda, 27/Mar/2024:

Israel's government has advanced plans for more than 3,400 new homes in settlements in the occupied West Bank.

(source)

(source)

ID: [A chart showing data related to Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank. The chart provides details on the daily average occurrences of attacks and reads: “Israeli settler attacks on the rise. According to the UN, Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank has increased in 2023 from an average of three incidents a day to seven since the Israel-Hamas war started on October 7.”

“SINCE OCTOBER 7:”

The chart shows how the number of attacks is currently on the rise, going from an average of 1 attack per day in 2021, to 2 per day in 2022, then 3 per day in 2023 up until Oct.6th.

Since October 7th, the average of number of attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has risen up to 7 attacks per day.] END ID

This chart was made on November 13, 2023. The number of attacks has drastically increased since then.

Update: Israel is annexing the West Bank as we speak. This is the largest West Bank land seizure (1,977 acres) since 1993.

"I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived.

My grandparents were killed in Aushwitz and most of my extended family were killed.

I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Aushwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent - that’s what’s called the 'Nakba' in Arabic; the 'disaster' or the 'catastrophe'.

There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then. It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century.

I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit! So then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an 'outdoor prison', which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity.

You think the worse thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

And 'anybody who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite' is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true."

Boycott Eurovision

Just to also add, this song was originally called "October Rain" and it is 100% Israeli propaganda, they were forced to change the lyrics because they were too political, and so they censored it so it could bypass the rules.

Taken from euronews. They also tried submitting another propaganda song called "Dance Forever" but that was rejected.

Boycott Eurovision.

bulbed saurs