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As the Ides of March approaches, let us all remember it not as the day Caesar was stabbed a whole bunch, but for what it truly was: the day a group of organized elected representatives killed a sitting unelected dictator.

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If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

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Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

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Hi 👋, My name is Mohammad, and I’m reaching out in a moment of desperate need. I’m a father of three young children living in Gaza, and we are caught in the midst of a catastrophic war. Our home is no longer a safe haven, and the future here seems increasingly uncertain. 💔

I’ve launched a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $60,000 to relocate my family to a safer place where my children can grow up in peace and have a chance at a brighter future.

Unfortunately, my previous fundraising efforts were abruptly halted when my account was terminated without explanation. However, I remain determined to keep fighting for my family’s safety and well-being. 🫶

If you could take a moment to read our story, consider donating, or simply share our campaign with others, it would make an incredible difference. Every act of kindness, no matter how small, brings us one step closer to safety and a new beginning. 🙏

Thank you for your time, compassion, and support. ❤️‍🩹

https://gofund.me/fd1faea2 🔗

I don’t have any money but I’m boosting this❤️❤️❤️

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Whenever an ugly feeling arises in me, maybe resent, greed, insecurity, etc. I just have to laugh and think to myself, this is what being alive is and I don’t deny my capacity for ugliness, in fact I store my faith in it because that same awareness of my own ugliness is the place I go to when I am aware of my own beauty. I have all the time in the world to sort it out, that’s the thing with self trust. I don’t hide from others and I don’t hide from myself, where there is ugliness I observe it and I don’t turn away.

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“ We have been shunned in our time, Vanessa. The world turns away in horror - why? Because we're different. Ugly. Exceptional. We are the lonely night creatures, are we not? ”

Christian Camargo and Eva Green as Dracula and Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful - Ebb Tide (3x07).

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Ghosts on a Tree (1933)

— by Franz Sedlacek

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I’m realizing that since I lost my old account I don’t really remember how to post on here…?

But does it even matter? No.

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We took many road trips with that car. They were always a lot of fun because of all the snacks, and the promise that this doctor would be the one to heal me. Forget holding my hand up to the screen as Benny Hinn sent miracles;

I remember a dusty road, I remember hard yellow cloud-shaped candy (or was it monkey shaped) that was too sweet it dissuaded me from ever having candy ever again. From my recollection I didn’t have candy again for at least a year. My mom has no recollection of this ever happening. In reality I may have probably had candy again the next week during one of the numerous birthday parties at school.

The road was long and dusty. My mom was so happy. At the hospital there was a man with a bottle-cap sized hole in his foot. They said it was “infected”. I knew that word. It meant gross… Infected meant gross and green and black.

Dr Wim was white. He was German. He couldn’t do anything I think, but he recommended physio-therapy. For months after that Auntie Princy my moms Indian physiotherapist friend painfully massaged my leg with oil and cold gels.

Playtime was for shaking and stoking my leg. I loved the playground for a long time until I didn’t. After the umpteenth fall off the slide or swings, I gradually became more cautious of what games did and didn’t end in some sort of pain, usually from one of my classmates stray limb’s hitting my leg. Playtime was for nursing pain. Playtime was for races. I loved races. Playtime was for bandit police. Children are the best at treating someone different like everyone else. They knew my legs hurt sometimes, but playtime was for racing in teams and we were all one big team. I wasn’t different then to them or myself, but difference always followed me like a cloud just out of view. It still does. When I fell off a tree, even as a bigger child my friends turned into all the adults I knew.

“Sorry” “Sorry” “Sorry”.

It was just how our life was.

I wonder if Marie Hotel still exists in Kampala Town. We spent what felt like ages on a pretty regular basis eating fruit salad every morning, greeting the waiters by name, and roaming the town window shopping, buying accessories, and receiving compliments. We were a beautiful little family. I remember most of the hospitals being within walking distance - The orange hotel with the nice Indian (who wasn’t so nice when he picked my finger and put the blood on a small glass sheet), and the CT scan that sounded like galloping horses and reminded me of the lion at the beginning of the cool movies… Mengo hospital where the nurse complimented me for not flinching when she took my blood. “Even grown ladies cry sometimes”. I wanted her to think I was a big girl, and I was used to it. There was a lady outside the the hospital entrance on a mat. She smelled like sickness. I sat on her mat and introduced myself. When woke up from the surgery at Mengo I don’t remember seeing a cast on my leg. I remember seeing pineapple chunks sticking out of the stitches. It was my leg.

Kampala was for buying Rolex off the street, carrying it back to the home we’d made in the hotel room, and watching a glowing red star from the fireworks cross our window. It was New Year’s Eve. It was new years and the house in Kigali was a distant memory. Nicholas gave his life to Christ in that hotel room. It was new year’s, or it was Christmas, or it was Easter. I don’t remember recovering.

In Grade 5 I had gotten very efficient at walking on my toes with my right leg. Sometimes I lay on the floor and stretched my leg out just enough that my heel could feel the cold of the ground. I rarely ever looked at my feet with the eyes of someone who wanted to fix them. My right foot was stuck in a balet pointe. I couldn’t rest too much weight on it. I knew but I never noticed because the body is usually good at compensating, and a child’s mind is good at creating and adjusting to new realities.

On a different trip to Kampala we’d met a man who made metal braced shoes. To make the shoes he first tried to force my foot into the position it needed to be in. I screamed for what felt like an eternity. Unsurprisingly, the thing standing between me and a flexible tendon was not a man with a strong will and very strong wrists. He wasn’t able to make the shoe.

Shoe-lifts were fun. We could add them to any cute pair of shoes without too much hassle. Then there was the surgery. Grade 5 was TR Molly and crutches and Mercy bringing my lunch to class for me. Grade 5 was for signing casts.

The first time I landed in Dubai, I was ecstatic. Hours later in Chennai I was relieved to both be sharing a room with my dad, and to have time off from school. While he was sleeping that night I took a selfie with his phone and posted it to Facebook, orange lighting, face barely visible, with a wide smile on my face. Nokia E73 was a very cool phone. He gave it to me the following year.

Sclerotherapy was a miracle for the lump on my thigh, and the tendon lengthening surgery was a success. As a write this I’m trying to stretch my tendon again. My foot can still sit at a 90 degree angle, but I should probably excercise it more. I remember sitting at a 90 degree angle with my legs stretched out in front of me for the first time in years with Grace focusedly massaging my toes the way she’d seen my mom do so they wouldn’t go numb. She did this for hours on end every time she came to the house. We aren’t friends anymore.

Frankenstein made his monster by gutting him, patching him up with bits and pieces of other bodies, stitching his limbs together, and more or less willing him into being. From a tapestry of dismembered parts, a mosaic of borrowed flesh and shattered identities . I often feel like a fractured and poorly reconstructed amalgamation of persons, those being the selves I lost or killed along the way, the selves I borrowed/stole/appropriated, like what I’d imagine a patchwork doll to be like. My body is probably the same way - missing organs, mismatched limbs, assorted dents and bumps, the occasional stitch or screw (I literally have screws in my right leg)- all of which I am usually able to will into the semblance of something that conforms to conventional standards, albeit one that constantly teeters on the edge of chaos.

I’ve had a lifetime to figure out which clothes, posture, and stance complement the flesh garment, and what shoes and hair match (for the most part). I’ve had so much yet so little bodily autonomy and privacy. I wonder if they’ll bury me in flattering clothes.

I remember so much. Here’s what I remember: Uganda; The ct scan near Marie hotel.The Ugandan hospital where they tried to force my leg into shape to make a shoe. The ugly shoe after the surgery in India. It was a hideous toe-less thing. Grace massaging my toes one by one. Pastor Kayumba praying against the demons he had created to take the blame. I remember Choir, I remember Tr Geoffrey’s office, I remember rushing to lunch. I don’t remember limping there.

Will they bury me in flattering clothes?

I don’t remember the first diagnoses, but I remember what they felt like, and I remember hoping and praying for a miracle… over and over, with my parents, with the pastors, with auntie Hope, with almost every single guest that came into our house… but never by myself. My body has just always been wrong: I have strange bumps on my back and upper hip, scars along my pelvis, a limp when I walk, and asymmetry that only slightly evened out when I decided to double my body weight. My feet are different sized, my back and right leg always ache dully in the background, and a scar the length of my arm down my chest and to my belly.

We can only live life the way it was given to us. I was born in pain… I was born with a limp… My mother will say that all this began when I was about 3, but as far as I can remember I have only ever known how to walk with a limp (and how to hide it), and how to live life with pain (and how to ignore it).

We owned a little black car, or maybe it was blue… I can’t for the life of me tell you anything about that car for certain because when you’re five years old the world is a constantly morphing psychedelic landscape that neither your parents or inanimate objects are exempt from being subject to. It was the same car with a backseat window that choked me when I stuck my head out one day. I’d memorized the ritual routine of my dad pulling into the house after picking me up from school. He’d honk the horn at the gate, and roll the car windows up as the car slid into the garage. He didn’t know I’d put my neck out one of the windows.

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Will they bury me in flattering clothes?

I don’t remember the first diagnoses, but I remember what they felt like, and I remember hoping and praying for a miracle… over and over, with my parents, with the pastors, with auntie Hope, with almost every single guest that came into our house… but never by myself. My body has just always been wrong: I have strange bumps on my back and upper hip, scars along my pelvis, a limp when I walk, and asymmetry that only slightly evened out when I decided to double my body weight. My feet are different sized, my back and right leg always ache dully in the background, and a scar the length of my arm down my chest and to my belly.

We can only live life the way it was given to us. I was born in pain… I was born with a limp… My mother will say that all this began when I was about 3, but as far as I can remember I have only ever known how to walk with a limp (and how to hide it), and how to live life with pain (and how to ignore it).

We owned a little black car, or maybe it was blue… I can’t for the life of me tell you anything about that car for certain because when you’re five years old the world is a constantly morphing psychedelic landscape that neither your parents or inanimate objects are exempt from being subject to. It was the same car with a backseat window that choked me when I stuck my head out one day. I’d memorized the ritual routine of my dad pulling into the house after picking me up from school. He’d honk the horn at the gate, and roll the car windows up as the car slid into the garage. He didn’t know I’d put my neck out one of the windows.

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Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

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Mary Oliver, "To Be Human Is to Sing Your Own Song." Blue Horses

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@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

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do you ever not write for so long that you’re almost afraid to? like what if I’m dumb now

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🍉Data sources under the cut🍉

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This is Rafah, The "safe" zone, where 1.5 million Palestinian fled to. You have to understand, what bombing Rafah means.

Please don't look away, while everybody is busy watching the super bowl, Israel commits one of its most deadly and openly genocidal attacks on Rafah. Please don't look away.

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thinking over and over and over of that clip from a maya angelou talk about the importance of knowing one another's history. no matter how brutal no matter how bleak no matter how despairing no matter anything because the only way through it is to go all the way through it. and the only way to build anything with one another is by having gone all the way through it because otherwise there is no connection. whats a connection worth that's built on ignorance? sustained by ignorance? "only equals can make friends" she says. only equals.