SPREADSHEET OF PALESTINIAN ESCAPE FUNDS‼️TIME SENSITIVE

Operation Olive Branch is a continuously updating spreadsheet of Palestinian escape funds where progress towards their goals is being tracked. As of right now, there are over 100 funds listed there.

Any amount of money can make a difference. With their recent decision to bomb Rafah, the only remaining “safe” territory in Gaza, Israel has forced Palestinians into a corner by giving them nowhere else to go. The international community has given Israel the ability to act with impunity - it is long past the point in time to rely on those in power to hold Israel to any standard of compassion.

Today, I want you to look at this document, choose a fund, contribute to it, and share it. The people in Rafah are living on borrowed time. Free Palestine.

In 1937, the Basque city of Gernika came under severe bombing by the Nazi Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria.

Picasso was so affected he painted the piece Guernica:

Today (December 8, 2023), Gernika created their own haunting demonstration in solidarity with Palestine:

(If you unmute, beware, there is the very loud sound of an actual air raid siren.)

It's a human mosaic and includes the mother with dead child from Guernica.

I think a lot about Leo standing up for his brothers in the things that really matter to them.

Like- Leo is the one who immediately pushes Mikey and Donnie into finding Raph the second it’s clear that their oldest brother is missing because he knows Raph can’t handle being separated like that.

Leo is the one who stands up for Mikey when Mikey wants to go on a solo mission, actively vouching for him and being the one to convince Raph into letting Mikey go, because being independent and proving himself just as capable of standing on his own two feet as everyone else means so much to Mikey.

And Leo defends Donnie’s honor in particular when his brothers’ intelligence is insulted because Leo is well aware of how important Donnie’s smarts are to him - and how important having those smarts valued and acknowledged is as well.

All this goes right into just how well Leo knows his brothers. For as much as he’ll tease or fight with them, he knows them, and he loves them.

[ID: a digital illustration in the shape of a scratchy oval. Within the oval, Martin is facing away from the viewer, looking down at something he’s holding close to his chest. He is a large chubby man in a cardigan, with short hair and glasses. Surrounding him is a dark, ghostlike figure, which is probably Jon. It has no facial features except very big eyes that are staring directly at Martin’s face. It is only inches away from Martin and has several thin arms that are clutching Martin tightly on his upper arm, around his hands, and around the back of his head. The figure’s torso and head appear solid, but dissolves into the background at its waist and from where its hair extends upwards and outside of the illustration. There are words at the top that say, “Oh, hello… are you still listening?” End ID]

Something that is sad but also that I hugely appreciate about CK is that by the end, most of the systems that harmed the crows are still in place, but their relationships with themselves have grown and changed. I find this particularly interesting in the cases of Jesper and Wylan (shocking I know). Their identities still put them in danger of being exploited or harmed - Grisha indentures are still the norm in Kerch, and the auction scene made it very clear that if the Council knew Wylan's illiteracy was true, they would treat him much the same as his father did due to the culture surrounding productivity and ability. This might seem disheartening, but the hope lies in the shift in how these characters see themselves and their role in the world. By the end of the book, Jesper and Wylan are beginning to put away their internalized shame surrounding their identities. They may still have to hide who they are from the world to survive, but they're no longer hiding it from themselves - their true selves are no longer this crushing burden they have to turn away from to function. A general theme of the series is how, in accepting who they are and what has happened to them on a personal level, the crows place themselves in positions to make change on a systemic level - Inej and her ship, Nina and her mission, Kaz and his Barrel empire, Wylan and Jesper with their political, high-society empire. None of them are all the way there yet by the end - they're still healing, and both the loss of Matthias and the weight of those oppressive systems are going to weigh on them for a long time - but we get to see the very beginnings of that process. I'm going to bite someone.

Hey guys, guess what?

I gave birth to a beautiful baby three days ago and I finally have a few seconds to breathe and distract myself by scrolling on my phone to see what's up in here.

Some of you who knew it was happening sent me messages and I promise, I will answer each and every one of your messages in time. Ngl, this birth was way more difficult than what I went through with my previous two children. But my baby is fine, I am fine, and we are settling back in our home.

And I want to thank everyone who sent their prayers and best wishes during this time ❤️

i really do mean it when i say we don't get to give up. while our governments do jackshit, crowdfunded campaigns got families out of gaza and made it possible to buy food and supplies in bulk when prices skyrocketed. no 'humanity is hopeless' sentiments okay? humanity is literally all we have. keep donating where you can and keep posting about palestine

looking forward to the new ep today but i'm still sad about logan dying accidentally nuking my tumblr account soooo have this silly tom gif i made but never posted here

In god's name, what did you talk about in there for 4 and a half hours?

you know, you can't just take my love and... bank it. and then take it with you to the love market, and see if you wanna invest in me.

2x10 / 3x1 / 3x2

I am generally fond of the Peter Jackson LORD OF THE RINGS movies (much more so than THE HOBBIT trilogy, which is an unmitigated disaster from start to finish), but I still feel that it was a tremendous error to remove "The Scouring of the Shire" from the ending of RETURN OF THE KING. I think I understand the rationale for omitting it — it further complicates what's already a protracted finale, and it is kind of a downer — but I suspect it's one of the changes to which Tolkien himself would have most objected.

First, it's an essential element in the arc of Frodo. Frodo has already been wounded in a way that even Elrond and Gandalf can't entirely fix, even after they remove the notch of the Morgul-knife. After enduring an impossible ordeal, he returns to the Shire to find that the war has come home in a way that, at least for him, can't be fully set right even after Saruman is dead and much of the immediate damage repaired. Frodo's original conflicts have been seemingly resolved: At the beginning of the book, he's seen in Hobbiton as an irresponsible youth of dubious background who grows into another suspicious eccentric like Bilbo, but by the end, they want to make him the mayor (to which Frodo only very reluctantly and temporarily agrees), and even his feud with the Sackville-Bagginses is ended. Even so, Frodo is left far more alienated than he ever was to start with, which is why he finally chooses to go over Sea rather than live out his life in the Shire.

Second, while it is superficially rather grim, I think Tolkien might have argued that it's actually his most hopeful chapter. Tolkien says in the introduction to the second edition that "The Scouring of the Shire" had its roots in his own childhood:

The country in which I lived in childhood [in Warwickshire] was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.

Thus, it seems significant that the shabby destruction of the Shire at the hands of Saruman and his men is actually set right remarkably quickly. As soon as Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return, they're able to rouse the other hobbits to action and drive out the ruffians within a matter of days, and Sam is even able to use Galadriel's gift to replace most of the trees that have been carelessly destroyed, with a magnificent mallorn-tree in place of the beloved Party Tree. The Shire hasn't wholly escaped the scars of industrialization, but the hobbits have come to their senses and turned back before it was too late.

That is really the most optimistic element of the story's finale. Aragorn's coronation means a restoration of order to the West, but magic and wonder are fading away or departing over Sea. Arwen has made the choice of Luthien and is doomed to eventually fade and leave the world; in the Appendices, after Aragorn's death, she returns to Lórien, now deserted, and essentially lies down and dies. Tolkien did not feel the Ents would ever find the Ent-wives, so they too will probably never flourish again. However, the Shire endures, in a way that the country where Tolkien grew up did not — not by remaining completely aloof from the world, but by rejecting the new mill and the smokestacks, and by "thousands of willing hands of all ages" deliberately tearing down everything built by Saruman and using the bricks "to repair many an old hole, to make it snugger and drier."

No Doubt is absolutely killing their Coachella set right now.

it makes me really happy to peak into the SIBR server and see people still working really hard at preserving blaseball and cracking it wide open. everyone in there is so talented and the sole reason why we have so much of blaseball still at our fingertips

I haven't really spoken about this with everything else going on, but it's been on my mind.

As a massive LPOTL fan, it was genuinely heartbreaking and disappointing to hear the news about Ben and what his girlfriend endured. When you listen to the episodes close to his departure, it's incredibly clear he's not fully present, and has lost a lot of his charm from earlier in the show. I hope his stint in rehab helps him find peace, and that Taylor finds safety and security going forward.

That being said, I am so glad Marcus and Henry decided to drop him from the show and the network as a whole. It was absolutely the right choice. It might not have been the safe decision, and definitely not the easy one. But it was correct. I am really enjoying Ed as the third host and I really hope they keep him full-time.

I'm not into celebrity worship but I am genuinely soooo disappointed about mark hamill. like not only supporting israel (which is bad enough) but making multiple tweets about it and comparing the iof to the rebels and palestine to the empire? come on. like how brainwashed and selfish do you have to be. I can't fathom it.