#{Saved}

[ghelgheli]

and to the tgirls who aren't sure why the dresses and the makeup and the jewelry aren't working for them: there can be more to "transfemininity" than the feminine timelines you see passed around like prayer beads. your "after" can be something else if you want it to be.

[irhabiya]

for the next couple days i'll be focusing on a handful of fundraisers that are very far away from their goals as of posting this. these were verified by @/mohameddd a palestinian in gaza right now who i speak with directly, i trust their legitimacy!

Hazem Al-Bardawil: Hazem's house was the target of an israeli airstrike on the 11th of october, his pregnant wife and children were martyred on that day and he was severely injured and left bed-ridden in intensive care for several days. he recently created this campaign to raise money for treatment and shelter. 0/£20,000

Mohammed Matar: Mohammed is a civil engineer, he's had to evacuate with his family several times from gaza city to the south then to rafah and so on in search of shelter and safety. his wife gave birth in february, and they're unable to find basic necessities for their newborn daughter like diapers or formula milk. €652/€20,000

Hazem Khalil's family: Hazem's family, consisting of his parents, his 4 brothers and his sister, live in the north of the gaza strip in jabalia refugee camp. Hazem is organizing this campaign to provide basic necessities for his family for the time being, and raising enough money to evacuate by the time the egyptian border opens. they've managed to reach their initial goal of €5,000 so far, which is enough to evacuate his younger brother, and he's aiming to raise another €5,000 by next sunday for his younger sister's evacuation. €5,204/€50,000

tomorrow i'll be posting another batch of fundraisers and i'll be following up with these few for now until they reach their goals inshallah

[creepymutelilbugger]

saw this weird bug on the wall can anybody tell me what it is ? thanks

[chiisana-sukima]

What's your opinion on the take that Sam is always running away?

The short answer is I think spn's ethics are insane.

The longer answer is that if you did a rewatch and counted up all the times that Sam objectively "runs away" from a problem/his family/etc and all the times Dean "runs away" from the same, I'm not sure who would actually win. But I do think the narrative frames Sam as the one who runs, and that, over the long term, it treats "running away" as his cardinal sin.

For example, when Dean runs away from his mistakes in Road Trip, the narrative does frame that as immature and self-destructive, and punishes him with the Mark of Cain. But by s11, this is reframed briefly as a "we" problem in s11a (Sam: "if we don't change, right now, all of our crap is just gonna keep repeating itself") and then never held against Dean personally thereafter. Whereas Sam's equivalent attempt at running away--the s4 demon blood arc--continues to be held against him by the narrative until at least 13x21 (Cas: we let Lucifer out of the Cage.)

Even more interestingly, at least to me, with the exception of Stanford, the narrative also tends to treat Dean's episodes of running away from Sam as "abandoning" him, but Sam's episodes of running away from Dean as "betraying" Dean.

This is Dean abandoning Sam to his fate as Lucifer's vessel. The narrative punishment is extreme, but not only does Dean get a do over in the same episode and it never comes up again, but the quote is remembered by fandom primarily as a quote about how close they are. And I do think that's borne out by the narrative. If Dean abandons Sam, the world will literally end.

Meanwhile though:

When Sam screws up with Dean, he's betraying him. The problem isn't just that Sam is an addict or that he ran away from Dean's attempt to forcibly detox him for his own somewhat questionable "good", but that he did so with a demon whore. It's portrayed as a personal betrayal in a way that Dean abandoning Sam to Lucifer is not.

In some ways, Sam is even the more steadfast brother. He may physically leave Dean at times but he never stops believing in Dean's capacity for good. When it's his turn to lock Dean in the panic room because Dean gives up and runs to destruction at the hands of Michael, he doesn't do it. And in the Mark of Cain arc, he affirms that even if Dean kills him, he accepts it as necessary and still believes Dean is a good man.

Which brings me to spn's ethics and fandom's response.

If there's one single thing that spn is entirely, completely, one hundred percent consistent on, it's that tumblr is wrong. You can't just walk out; leaving is always wrong and will usually end the world. It's wrong if it's temporarily for the evening because you'd like to have Thanksgiving dinner and your family doesn't do that, or for four years because you want to go to college, or for forever because all your remaining loved ones have been killed before your eyes, or if it's only a partial withdrawal because you want better boundaries in the face of years of violence and autonomy violations. (To be clear, spn thinks the violence and autonomy violations are wrong too; it's just especially adamant that the only appropriate response is self-sacrifice.) The only reason Sam is finally allowed to temporarily leave in the finale is because he so obviously no longer wants to.

And all of this, to be completely blunt, is batshit fucking crazy. And I mean that in the clinical technical sense of the word. As a system of ethics it's an enormous mess, as a behavioral guide it's guaranteed to result in inappropriate assignment of blame and unnecessary suffering, and it's hard to interpret it all for me personally as anything but a response to trauma.

I do think that on an emotional level there's something wildly compelling about it though, and it's fiction, after all, so there's nothing wrong with it as a fantasy. The idea that if only you could prove your loyalty strongly enough your family would finally accept you, flaws and all, is an impossible wish many of us have spent a lot of our real lives trying to actualize. And seeing it happen on screen when it can't happen irl can be cathartic, much like revenge stories can be cathartic even though irl revenge is a terrible idea. The vibes are, in short, without flaw.

The thing that's hard for me though is remembering that everyone irl grows at their own speed. Not everyone is in a position to cleanly separate their emotional enjoyment of a plotline or theme from their intellectual calculus about whether or not it makes any fucking sense--especially when those plotlines or themes are about violence, betrayal, abandonment, and abuse. And it's hard for me to remember sometimes that huge swathes of meta aren't actually the result of [insert negative judgement here] but are just reflective of a different series of experiences than the ones I happen to have had.

Honestly I find it frustrating. I wish people would be better about separating out what the story is saying from what they think of that message themselves. I feel like the format of fandom meta is often kind of a disaster. It adopts an authoritative, academic tone, but is usually actually used to express personal feelings and wishes without acknowledging that it's doing that.

It's not that I think people should have to disclose their personal experiences to write meta--on the contrary, sometimes that's helpful but sometimes it just makes it worse. Rather, I wish people would get in the habit of using more "I" statements and acknowledging their subjectivity more overtly. Back in the days when dinos roamed the earth and I was an undergrad, I learned that the use of the third person passive voice in academic writing is a political choice. It grants the illusion of more authority and objectivity than actually exists. I wish fandom would take up my professor's call to abandon it to some extent and say "I feel hurt that Sam left Dean alone with John to go to college" rather than "Sam is always running away".

[enden-k]

this is my new favorite thing ever now

[rusomnia]

just saying jason todd probably wrote batman fanfic as both a form of therapy and karma

my evidence:

- he's a lit nerd. every lit nerd has written fanfiction at somepoint. if you're a lit nerd and you haven't, you're a liar or you will be writing fanfiction soon. be ready.

- you're a liar if you think the batfam didn't have a giant fandom in gotham city (and other cities that had batman shipped with their hero (metropolis im looking at you))

- he'd get to tear the shit out of batman with well thought out arguments against stuff without actually having to try and make bruce listen

- the authors notes.

- 'sorry i haven't updated in two years, i got blown up resurrected and turned into an assassin by my step-mum. here's some fluff as an apology'

- i feel like i could go on for a while but I'll leave it there

[fredbydawn]

I think the Saw games suffer not because of the repetitive puzzles, clunky combat, or even because of the canon timeline inconsistent story, I think they suffer cuz if we’re being honest with ourselves, the best way to adapt a Saw film into a game is as one of those weird thinly veiled fetish content mobile game ads, like you can't tell me that Adam and Lawrence don’t give off the vibe of pregnant balding women dying of hypothermia and you have to play a Bejeweled clone to stop a can of gasoline from dousing an electrical fire

[thecrazyalchemist]

<2

XD this is perfect

[pratchettquotes]

A howl went up from a distant hill.

"That's Gavin," said Carrot.

"A wolf? Gavin's a wolf? I've been saved from werewolves by wolves?"

"It's all right, sir. When you think about it, it's not really any different from being saved from werewolves by people."

Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

[ghelgheli]

schools like ucla temporarily switching to remote instruction is twofold interesting because first, it is a transparent attempt to wait out the disruptive effects of protest by shifting the learning environment into the private space (a capitalist innovation!) of the student's room, which a protest cannot so easily impinge upon; but second, it is something that would not have been possible before the pandemic, before the mass adoption of technologies that could serve accessibility but are now being deployed by the reactionary project. an ongoing pandemic is not reason enough to let students participate remotely—the threat that truths about imperialism will spill into this environment of "higher education", however, is enough to force them to.

[irhabiya]

Fundraiser Masterpost

this is a compiled list of families who have contacted me and have been vetted, with links to the fundraisers and verification, and the fundraisers' progress at the time of them being added to this post. this will help me keep track of everyone, i'll try to update this as regularly as i can. last updated: July 11th

Mohammed Bardaweel: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €6,119 raised of €37,000

Marah Salem: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €11,567 raised of €55,000

Renad Majed: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, £15,473 raised of £25,000

Tahani Shorbaje: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, $15,967 raised of $50,000

Husam Thaher: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €6,975 raised of €25,000

Tahseen Tawfiq: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €15,245 raised of €60,000

Firas Salem: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €33,245 raised of €65,000

Mahmoud Abu Hamam: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, $14,876 CAD raised of $50,000

Issam Aziz/Haifa Aziz: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €21,667 raised of €25,000

Sanaa & Rana Abu Ghaben: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, $5,576 CAD raised of $100,000

Nada Saftawi: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €11,163 raised of €16,000

Ahmed Alanqar: shared by @/palipunk (under the name Abdallah Alanqar but it's for his brother Ahmed), €23,120 raised of €35,000

Mohammed Alanqar: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein (again, under the name Abdallah Alanqar, this time it's for his brother Mohammed's family), €32,017 raised of €38,000

Abdelrahman Alanqar: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €7,110 raised of €20,000

Amira Alanqar: vetted by @/nabulsi, €11,905 raised of €20,000

Mohammed Hilles: vetted by @/nabulsi, €21,735 raised of €37,000

Tamer Al-Deeb: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €17,627 raised of €40,000

Mohammed Al-Deeb: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €18,423 raised of €30,000

The Sharif Family: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, $8,583 raised of $90,000

Aya Maher: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein, €4,388 raised of €25,000

Shahd Muhammad: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, $8,006 raised of $50,000

Mohammad Al Manasra: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, €11,020 raised of €40,000

The Shehab Family: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein (under the name Fahed Shehab), €18,861 raised of €50,000

Samer Abu Ras: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, kr59,051 SEK raised of kr450,000

Bassam Shaqoura: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, €23,571 raised of €45,000

Ahmed & Abdelrahman Al-Nabih: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, €4,872 raised of €30,000

Noor Alanqar: shared by @/90-ghost, €5,400 raised of €40,000

Siraj and his family: vetted by @/nabulsi, $3,176 CAD raised of $82,000

Mahmoud Ziad: shared by @/90-ghost, $12,615 raised of $30,000

Raghad Qanou: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, £3,218 raised of £55,000

Eyad Sami: shared by @/90-ghost & @/mohammedalanqer (whose fundraiser is listed above), CHF5,442 raised of CHF20,000

Ashraf Alanqar: shared by @/90-ghost, €2,413 raised of €30,000

Amal Ashour: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, €9,945 raised of €30,000

Mahmoud Khalaf: vetted by @/el-shab-hussein & @/nabulsi, €12,144 raised of €30,000

Intisar Abushammaleh: vetted by @/nabulsi, $7,874 raised of $40,000

Hanaa Ibrahim: unvetted yet on tumblr however it is very highly likely to be legit! (link to her college alumni collective sharing her fundraiser), $34,390 raised of $100,000

Mahmoud Al-Sharif: shared by @/90-ghost, $755 raised of $60,000

Muhammad Atallah: shared by @/90-ghost, €1,579 raised of €82,000

i still have a couple campaigns that i need to make sure are vetted in my inbox. please let me know if any of the links are missing/don't work!

[taurusmoon2008]

• Were you never loved ?

No , not truly atleast

• Then , what did you do ?

I became the love I never received and made sure no else feels the way I do

[wiirocku]

Matthew 24:13 (NLT) - But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

[enden-k]

Made you something

my followers here will be so confused about this (we all had a fun discussion on my nsfw blog and this is the result)

ANW I LOVE IT AHAHHAAAA

[dyspri]

[sasslett]

WoL/FFXIV OC Swap Meet Sign Ups!

Alright, since people seem to dig the idea, let's do it! Reblog this post to enter yourself in (reblogs please! makes it easier than just likes) and in a few weeks... let's say, July 15, two and a half weeks, I'll draw names and do a Secret Santa-style pairing system (so who you get isn't necessarily who got you) to exchange OC info and make something lovely!

Rules:

Reblog this to be entered!

Please be ready with info about your characters *by the time the entry period is over (July 15)* - a brief summary or bio, posted writing, reference sheets, character files for posing (if you don't have this someone else can help don't worry), etc. Don't make somebody read 50k words or search through your unorganized tags for OC info.

Be kind! Everyone has different levels of OC lore, there is no hate or no cringe here, and everyone has different levels of creative skills, so appreciate what you get and know it was made with love!

Be mindful of mods - if you use them, provide that info but don't be upset if the person who gets your character doesn't.

There are no rules on what the gifts can be, only that it must portray your assignee's OC in some manner, and if you want to do something explicit/adult with them, please clear that with your assignee first! There's also no time limit on the prizes, but do try to be timely/considerate.

As of right now, I'm not going to limit how many OCs you can include in your gift, but please discuss this with your assigned and be mindful of how much work additional characters can be, and have a favorite ready in case they'd only like to work with one.

Don't be an ass about your reward - no one knows your characters like you do, and if someone interprets them differently based on the info given, don't be rude. This is all just for fun and we go into this understanding that others will see our characters in their own way!

No skill level required - just do your best and create from your heart, novice or professional alike!

FFXIV only, please!!! If your character exists outside the realm of XIV, you can include that info, but don't expect others to be able to follow necessarily.

If I think of more rules I'll add more - and fear not, no one will go without a partner! I'll take on multiple people if need be, to make sure we all get something sweet. If you have any rules to add, please let me know.

And above all else... have fun, and treat each other with kindness!!!