Yesterday marked the 100th day of genocide. Please, do not get used to this. Our people, killed, bombed, kidnapped, stripped, executed and starved is not normal. Our kids in pieces, their body parts collected in bags is not normal.

Israel has killed 23,700 human. More than 10,300 child. We'd need 177 school bus to carry the Palestinian children killed by Israel in gaza. 10,022 fatherless child. 8,352 motherless child. The wounded have their wounds rot and die waiting in front of the crossing. Maggots seen inside alive people's wounds. 5,500 pregnant woman will give birth in the upcoming weeks. 100 Days of Genocide. 100 Days of the world watching silently.

So, just curious how many writers and creators will have to be forcibly outed by relentless harassment before we acknowledge that "This queer characters was written by a cishet person and that's why they're bad" is not good criticism.

Haven't been able to think about anything other than the victorian/edwardian/WW1 twink and his 80's punk almost-boyfriend for a week, send help

Today is the 6th of April, which is International Asexuality Day - so, shoutout to all the ace selfshippers out there!! I hope you all have a great day today ^-^

I'm thinking abt that pretty fall leaves embroidery pattern post and about how like... it is categorically a repost, it's a reupload. right? a thing that is generally disliked. but because it's credited, it's genuinely boosting the artist in question. and it could ALWAYS be like this. reposting content could ALWAYS be a symbiotic relationship, but because sourcing back to the original creator of something is so uncommon, it's just easier to ask people not to repost it at all. and people still don't understand the difference. or they'll go to the effort of cropping out usernames/signatures to repost something, which is More Effort than literally crediting the creator of something you liked enough to want to repost. Like. I literally don't actually care if my own shit gets reposted, you have to understand. I just don't want it STOLEN. But "do not repost" is easier to write on my art than "you can repost this, but don't alter the image/remove my signature, don't you dare write 'credit goes to the artist' because that is not credit, please link back to my original post or someplace that you can actually find me. please use an actual link/url instead of writing a non-clickable link of my username, because making it text instead of a clickable link cuts the number of people who will go to the effort of visiting my own page in Half." All those aggregate themed accounts, those fuckin annoying as hell instagrams and facebook groups that are like "body positive art we love wamen 💕 hashtag feminism" and then MASS-STEAL plus sized art created by women, if pages like these that always go and steal my older self-portraits and other works... If they just put a link to my prints of those pieces in the text of those posts, or, fuck, my commission info page? I would literally be living on the moon right now. I would have a house on the moon

IM NOT A DOCTOR BUT I THINK I MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP

🫶🫶🫶

Whenever a player safewords, this is an occasion for mutual support. We understand that nobody safewords from a happy place, and that all of our egos feel frail and kind of runty when we need to back out of a scene. It is completely unethical to respond with scorn or ridicule to a person who has safeworded: S/M is not a competition, we are not playing against each other.

As tops, we have noticed that if we are having a good time and our bottom safewords, our initial feelings may not be happy. Whaddaya mean you don't like that? I do all this work and you don't appreciate it? I'm hot for being in control and you want me to stop? We have felt real anger and felt challenged in our top role... and, on a deeper level, we have felt put down, hurt and rejected. It is okay to have these feelings. It is not okay to act on them. Take three deep breaths and everybody start taking care of each other.

Sometimes bottoms get so deeply engaged in a scene that they fail to safeword, or forget, or so profoundly believe in the fantasy that it doesn't occur to them: many of the techniques we play with, like interrogation, function in the real world to undermine volition. Dossie remembers a scene in which a top offered her a choice of something or other: "I felt very confused. Some distant part of me vaguely remembered having made choices, but the response from my state of consciousness at that time was, Choose? I am not a thing that chooses." So then what is the top's responsibility?

If a bottom does not safeword and you don't pick up on what's going on, and this will happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what's going on.

And just because someone safeworded doesn't mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn't feel like the right thing right now - but most often we find that after we've dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we're still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.

from The New Topping Book (2003) by Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy

(note: the authors use ‘top’ & ‘bottom’ in the historical S/M sense, meaning ‘person performing the act’ & ‘person receiving the act’; the act in question is not necessarily penetration.)

it has been said over and over again but if y'all want this fandom to live all the way until season 3 you NEED to start reblogging posts. and no, i don't just mean the occasional one you deem worthy, i mean every single post you like should ALSO be reblogged.

the only exception are posts that are very personal or have a disclaimer, although tumblr has the options to turn reblogs OFF.

so if reblogs are on - REBLOG the post. likes do not mean shit, i'm sorry, there is no algorithm based on likes. they're appreciated but they do not do anything, they do not help spread content, they do nothing to further connection within the fandom.

a 1:10 reblog to likes ratio is disheartening, and there will be more than a few people who get only likes and zero other interactions who will stop posting because of that.

tumblr lives off of reblogs, this isn't twitter or instagram or tiktok, you HAVE to reblog posts, that's the whole goddamn point of the system.

so please, i don't care if you have zero followers or two thousand, reblog every post you like, especially if it's art (whether written, gifs, fanart, etc. doesn't matter).

i have a plan for punctuation day everyone! so here's what i want you all to do!

my goal for the day is to get punctuation trending. is this too ambitious? maybe, but i don't care. i want everyone to appreciate punctuation a little

what are some things i can do you ask? well let's look at some things i could think of:—

you can make a post with every punctuation on it (but try, and here's the hard part) to put some text around it and not just list them all out

you can make up a new punctuation mark! for inspiration i would look at the works of people like hervé bazin, martin k specktor, or other people who tried to invent new punctuation

you can make a post about your favorite punctuation mark and why you like it

you can post anything related to punctuation really, those were my ideas but feel free to. i dunno. dress up as an interrobang or make art or something. go wild

so everyone! mark your calendars! september twenty fourth is the day we get #punctuation trending!

— richard siken, detail of the woods

They pointed a gun at Aaron. When there was a self immolation in December, the authorities spoke about it as if it was a form of antisemitism.

I have said it before. I will say it again.

It is an act of despair and feeling like nothing else you can do will be heard. Nobody burns themselves alive out of hatred.

Nobody.

I truly believe it was an act of grief. it was an act of fury. but i want to stress that it was not an act of hopelessness. like i said before, it was not just suicide, it was a calculated political act made by a determined man of sound mind and body who decided to use his death to send a message. he burned himself in front of the embassy in uniform because he knew that in the eyes of the US government, his life was worth more than the lives of Palestinians. His death was a deliberate attempt to call attention to the deaths of the thousands upon thousands of innocent people in Gaza. the point is that every death an inhumane brutal unconscionable horrific end to a real human life. the point is to disturb. the point is to be seen and heard and felt. he died screaming for Palestine.

like i said in another post, I took a class violent and nonviolent protests as an undergrad, and we talked a LOT about self immolation, and the work / thought / motives / grief / anger that goes into something like that. I’m gonna link a few articles if anyone is interested, I know it’s a really heavy subject but I also think its important to understand the role the act of self immolation has played in the history of protest:

this is about religious activists (both quakers and buddhists) who self immolated in protest of the Vietnam War

this is about the terminology we use to talk about self-immolation (specifically about the self immolation of tibetans in Protest of Chinese occupation) and about the objectives of political self immolators

and lastly, i am telling EVERYONE to read Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics by Ted A. Smith. it’s not about self immolation, but it is about the use of violence in systemic oppression and resistance and deals with the question of Who Defines What Violence Is (spoiler alert: the state defines what violence is, and the definition will always stretch to include the actions of the resistance and exclude the actions of the state). it is a really in depth and succinct examinations of the mechanisms of state sanctioned violence, and its HUGELY relevant to everything that’s been happening. PLEASE read it. everybody should read it. i don’t have a link to a pdf but im sure you can find one, or get it from a library or bookstore. it’s worth having, honestly. go read it.

So I was musing to Mags about how somehow in the last few years, after being weirdly unapproachable (and really awkward with children) all my life, I am now often the person that single mothers will approach to take a family photo for them, or small children will abruptly hand their toys off to with no warning.

And then I realized (after a moment, because I rarely get to go out around people anymore except when my dad abducts me for a tiny vacation, so I don't have a lot of normal life to compare that to) that all those experiences actually happened in museums and aquariums and zoos, where I am not more outgoing but I am much brighter and smiling more than usual and almost always sharing random facts with my dad because infodumping is my love language...

And then I realized these people are approaching me because when I am in that specific environment, I am giving off very chill Ms. Frizzle vibes.

Gay as fuck to be stuck in a timeloop with another man. You want to relive the same day with him over and over again? You want to die in each other's arms every single time? You want to grab him by the shoulders and desperately try to explain to him what's going on while he looks into your eyes and chooses to believe you bc he trusts you no matter what? You might as well fuck him on the floor

I feel like something terrible has happened, she'd said, running up to her Captain to seek out comfort and reassurance; a friend to soothe her worries. But all she had found were tears, rage and trembling hands; a blaster aimed at her head and a voice screaming at her to stay back.

Ahsoka had watched, frozen, as her men—brothers, who had chosen to wear her face as a sign of loyalty—transformed into cold-blooded killers. In a matter of seconds, their force-signatures skinned of all individuality and any sense of free will. When they opened fire upon her she'd defended herself without a second thought. The bodies had fallen whilst she dodged another bolt.

She still doesn't think about their names.

Months had passed since then. Operation Knightfall had ripped the Galaxy of thousands of its brightest souls in one night. The darkness that followed it hardly conceals the blood oozing from various planets and tainting surrounding star systems. The force is a gaping black hole. Nothing left of its radiant embrace to calm her pounding heart. It had left her with stains of darkness—sticking to her like Nubian honey— after the first time, she had tried to submerge herself in meditation. She hasn't touched it since.

Ahsoka sighs.

Breathing in the salty air, she lets her eyes wander across the endless widths of the ocean and clutches the lightsaber shoto to her chest. The Kyber crystal inside whimpers and she shivers.

The screams and whispers of the dying follow her every waking moment. And the corpses—broken on the floor like puppets with their strings cut—haunt her dreams. She's not able to shake the guilt weighing down on her shoulders and she knows she never will be.

The shoto feels hot pressed against her chest. It's painful to hold on to it and if she didn't know any better she would let it fall into the yawning abyss. But she does. She recognizes the stinging sensation of the blisters on her palms for what it is: Phantom Pain.

The crystal carries her memories.

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