Al-Jazeera stole a video from Moataz Abu Sakran, a video which he singlehandedly filmed and edited. They then incorrectly credited a different account, the owner of which is not even in north Gaza.

Moataz risked his life to get this footage, and shared it so that the world would see the damage inflicted on his home by the occupation. Al-Jazeera has way too many resources at their disposal to carelessly commit misattribution like this.

Moataz has started a fund to rebuild his house for himself and his wife and baby girl. The fund is linked here. Please share it and donate if you can.

unforgiven.

Louis, he’s a non-verbal Toreador vampire NPC from our 1940 VTM game.

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CUTE BOYS CUTE BOYS CUTE BOYS

not dead not alive but a secret third thing

hey did you know that uhh

i. the monster's body is a cultural body

ii. the monster always escapes

iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis

iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference

v. the monster polices the borders of the possible

vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire

vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming

Have you heard of the tragedy of the Champion of Kirkwall?

+ Bonus

The og post that made me go insane

To start thinking about Roman slavery is to stare into an infinite abyss of deliberate human suffering. The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery. Slavery was the social and economic foundation upon which the entire Roman Empire rested. But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans. A thousand years before the year I wrote this, King Cnut was glaring down the sea. A thousand years is an immense amount of time. And they didn’t just have domestic slaves, they had vast mines across the Empire for silver, lead, gold, iron and copper. Google the Las Médulas mines in Spain and imagine the sixty thousand enslaved people who worked there twenty-four hours a day to produce the gold the Roman Empire demanded, and then multiply that by hundreds of years and hundreds of sites and all those lives that were sent to toil for nothing and join me staring into this bottomless pit of Roman horror. Then picture the near infinite acres of land owned by the Gaius Caecilius Isidoruses and Melanias of the Roman world, each maintained by chain gangs of hundreds of enslaved people. And on top of that were those enslaved in the house, the cooks and cleaners and washers and dressers, the people enslaved by the state who maintained the aqueducts and laid the roads and built all those temples and fora across the vast Empire and fought fires and carried the emperor in his litter. A general estimate (which means, of course, a total guess but a guess from someone I’d trust in a quantitative situation) is that there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome‘s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people. Millions and millions and millions of lives, each a person with a heart full of love and hate and envy and joy and aching knees and sore eyes and dreams and thoughts and desires and hopes, all of whom were owned by another person and subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

A report just came out from a Palestinian hostage saying he was strapped with bombs and sent into a Hamas tunnel, with Israel prepared to blow the tunnel up with his body if fighters were found inside and yet people are still making the “Hamas uses human shields” arguments that have been confirmed to be a myth with no supporting evidence

Astarion's Tent

Has anyone paid attention to how Astarion's tent reflect on his personality?

The exteriour side is clean and elegant. There are pillows, a carpet, an expensive mirror, even a fucking plant (headcanon - Astarion is into gardening). His tent is probably the most well-maintained in the whole camp.

But take a look inside (it's difficult since he blocks the entrance) - it's a mess.

There are empty bottles with blood (as if he is an alcoholic who doesn't bother to take out the garbage). There is no bed (Halsin is also an Elf but he has a bedrol in his tent) - it's just wooden plank, a piece of rag for a blanket and some sorry excuse for a pillow. His tent is a mess like this room who belongs to an addict or a depressed person. It's dirty, full of garbage. And he doesn't have a comfortable place for sleep!

All the good things (new and clean) he has are put out in the front to others to see. When people pass by they see this beautiful picture of a gedonist-magistrate who wants everything to be in order. Dare to look inside - it's a completely different picture.

The BG3 party members being bi disasters: a series

If I see anyone call the companions "playersexual" one more time, I'm shooting them in the kneecaps.

I draw stupid silly things

She came to him with a broken heart; little did he know that fixing it would bond theirs both together to the hells and back… oh yes, i did that

prints | patreon (has version without lettering for download)

More modern AU

Twenty years later after many Arab cities had fallen, the thoughts I was sharing in Hebrew with a friend at a restaurant did not please a man sitting there, and he set to defending Israeli oppression with what he considered an irrefutable argument. He said you don't know these Arabs, and if you knew them, you wouldn't speak about justice in this manner. I asked him to tell me more. He knit his brow and said, "Have you heard of a village called al-Birwa?" "No," I answered. "Where is it?" "You won't find it on this earth," he said. "We blew it up, raked the stones out of its earth, then plowed it until it disappeared under the trees." "To cover up the crime?" I asked. He corrected me, protesting, "No, it was to cover up its crime, that damned place." "And what was its crime?" I asked. "It resisted us," he answered. "They fought back, costing us many casualties, and we had to occupy it twice. The first time we were eating dinner, and the tea was hot. The villagers surprised us and took it back. How could we accept such an insult? You don't know the Arabs, and now I'm telling you." I told him I was Arab, and that it was my village. He apologized politely but awkwardly, talked of peace, then invited me to his shop, where he was auctioning off furnishings and household utensils plundered from the city of Quneitra.

— Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi

I'm sure you have a post about this already, but I couldn't find it in your master post list! I was wondering what advice you have for writing scenes where a character is in extreme pain. I'm writing a scene where a character has sustained serious injuries and her friends have to patch her up with little to no pain management. I want her to be fully aware of what's happening but it's difficult to describe it any way other than "it hurt when she was putting the stitches in" (to put it simply) :)

Making Pain Scenes More Interesting

There are three go-to areas when describing something like pain:

1 - Metaphor and Simile 2 - Sensory words and details 3 - Internal sensations

So, as your character is experiencing the pain, you can use metaphor and simile to describe the pain. Rather than "each stitch was painful" you could do something like, "As Brad stitched me up, each puncture of the needle was like a flaming dagger piercing my skin."

Sensory words and details (words that have to do with sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) also make the description more vivid. What can your character see, hear, smell, taste, and touch as they are experiencing this pain. They might see the fear or concern on the faces of their friends. They might hear someone's breath hitch or hear someone gasp. They might smell the stinging scent of antiseptic or alcohol being used to wash the wound. They might taste the salt of their own tears or bile coming up in their throats. They might feel the pierce of the needle or the warmth of oozing blood. Vivid sensory sight words like blood, gore, pooling... sound words like gasp, groan, hiss... etc., can give the scene more impact.

And finally, what is your character noticing that they feel (and what are they thinking) on the inside? Not just the pain, but things like nausea, upset stomach, dizziness, racing heart, tingling, burning, breathlessness, sleepiness... emotions like fear, regret, uncertainty... wishing they had done something different or wishing they had more control over what is happening.

These are all great things to cover rather than just "the stitches really hurt." :)

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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