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fairuzfan · 3 months

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During an appearance at Vassar College in early February, controversial New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was asked about the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families from homes in East Jerusalem which Israel occupied in 1967. Israeli courts have ruled that Jewish settlers could take over some Palestinian homes on the grounds that Jews held title to the properties before Israel was established in 1948.

Bronner was concerned, but not only about Palestinians being made homeless in Israel’s relentless drive to Judaize their city; he was also worried about properties in his West Jerusalem neighborhood, including the building he lives in, partially owned by The New York Times, that was the home of Palestinians made refugees in 1948. Facts about The New York Times’ acquisition of this property are revealed for the first time in this article.

“One of the things that is most worrying not just the Left but a lot of people in Israel about this decision is if the courts in Israel are going to start recognizing property ownership from before the State [of Israel was founded],” Bronner said according to a transcript made by independent reporter Philip Weiss who maintains the blog Mondoweiss.net.

Bronner added, “I think the Palestinians are going to have a fairly big case. I for example live in West Jerusalem. My entire neighborhood was Palestinian before 1948.”

The New York Times-owned property Bronner occupies in the prestigious Qatamon neighborhood, was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar (1905-2007). Karmi was forced to flee with his family in 1948 as Zionist militias occupied western Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. His was one of an estimated 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem that Jews took over that year.

The New York Times bought the property in 1984 in a transaction overseen by columnist Thomas Friedman who was then just beginning his four-year term as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Hasan Karmi’s daughter, Ghada, a physician and well-known author who lives in the United Kingdom, discovered that The New York Times was in – or rather on top of – her childhood home in 2005, when she was working temporarily in Ramallah. One day Karmi received a call from Steven Erlanger, then The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, who had just read her 2002 memoir In Search of Fatima.

Karmi recalled in a 15 May 2008 interview on Democracy Now! that Erlanger told her, “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house … From the description in your book it must be the same place” (“Conversation with Palestinian Writer and Doctor Ghada Karmi”).

At Erlanger’s invitation, Karmi visited, but did not find the elegant one-story stone house her family had moved into in 1938, that was typical of the homes middle- and upper-class Arabs began to build in Jerusalem suburbs like Qatamon, Talbiya, Baqa, Romema or Lifta toward the end of the 19th century. The original house was still there, but at some point after 1948 two upper stories had been built.

Erlanger, responding to questions posed by The Electronic Intifada via email, described the residence as “built over the Karmi family house – on its air rights, if you like. The [New York Times] is not in [the Karmi] house.” Erlanger described the building as having an “unbroken” facade but that it consisted of “two residences, two ownerships, two heating systems,” and a separate entrance for the upper levels reached via an external staircase on the side.

Questions The Electronic Intifada sent to Thomas Friedman about the purchase of the property were answered by David E. McCraw, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for the newspaper, who wrote that the original Karmi house itself “was never owned even partly by The Times. The Times purchased in the 1980s a portion of the building that had been constructed above it in the late 1970s.” The purchase was made from “a Canadian family that had bought them from the original builders of the apartment.”

McCraw acknowledged in a follow-up conversation that as a general principle of property law, the “air rights” of a property – the right to build on top of it or use (and access) the space above it – belong to the owner of the ground.

Exiled from Qatamon

Ghada Karmi standing by the front door of her childhood home in Jerusalem’s Qatamon neighborhood in 2005. (Steven Erlanger)

Hasan Karmi hailed originally from Tulkarem, in what is now the northern West Bank. In 1938, he moved his family to Jerusalem to take up a job in the education department of the British-run Palestine Mandate government. Ghada – born around November 1939 (the exact date is unknown because her birth certificate along with all the family’s records, photographs, furniture, personal possessions and an extensive library were lost with the house) – has vivid memories of a happy childhood in what was a well-to-do mixed neighborhood of Arab Christians and Muslims, foreigners and a few Jewish families. The neighbors with whom her parents socialized and with whose children the young Ghada and her siblings played included the Tubbeh, Jouzeh, Wahbeh and Khayyat families. There was also a Jewish family called Kramer, whose father belonged to the Haganah, the Zionist militia that became the Israeli army after May 1948.

Karmi describes the house at length in her memoir – but she told The Electronic Intifada her fondest memories were of the tree-filled garden where she spent much time playing with her brother and sister and the family dog Rex. The lemon and olive trees she remembers are still there, Erlanger noted to The Electronic Intifada.

In the mid-1940s, the lively Qatamon social life gave way to terror as the dark clouds of what would come to be known as the Nakba approached. Violence broke out all over Jerusalem after the UN’s devastating recommendation to partition Palestine without giving its people any say in the matter. Spontaneous riots by Arabs were followed by organized violence from Zionist groups and mutual retaliatory attacks that claimed lives from both communities. This climate provided the pretext for the Haganah’s premeditated campaign to seize Jerusalem.

Poorly armed and disorganized Arab irregulars, who had nevertheless succeeded in disrupting Zionist supply convoys to Jerusalem, proved no match for highly-trained and well-armed Zionist militias which, on the orders of David Ben-Gurion, began a well-planned campaign to conquer the western parts of the city. The occupation of western Jerusalem and some 40 villages in its vicinity was executed as part of the Haganah’s “Plan Dalet.” These events are well documented in books including Benny Morris’ The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Walid Khalidi’s (ed.) All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992), Salim Tamari’s (ed.) Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War (1999) and Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

Zionist militias used frequent bombings of Arab civilians to terrorize residents into fleeing. These attacks were amplified by posters and warnings broadcast over loudspeakers that those choosing to remain behind would share the fate of those killed in atrocities.

Karmi wrote that one night in November 1947, their neighbor Kramer came to see her father and said, “I have come to tell you at some risk to myself to take your family and leave Jerusalem as soon as possible …. Please believe me, it is not safe here.” Many Qatamon families left after the Zionist bombing of the nearby Semiramis Hotel, which killed 26 civilians including the Spanish consul-general, on the night of 4-5 January 1948.

The Karmis however held on, and Ghada records in her memoir her mother steadfastly saying, “The Jews are not going to drive me out of my house … Others may go if they like, but we’re not giving in.”

Toward the end of April, bombardment by Zionist militias against virtually undefended Arab areas became so heavy, and the terror generated by the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that month so intense, that the Karmis relented and departed by taxi for Damascus, via Amman, with nothing but a few clothes. Their intention was to bring the children to safety at their maternal grandparents’ house while the adults would return home to Jerusalem. A few days after reaching Damascus the elder Karmis tried to return to Jerusalem but were unable to do so. So began the family’s exile that continues to this day.

As Arabs left their homes, Jews were moved in by the Haganah. “While the cleansing of Qatamon went on,” Itzhak Levy, the head of Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem recalled, “pillage and robbery began. Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food” (quoted in Pappe, p.99). Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli scholar and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, wrote in his book Sacred Landscape of personally witnessing the “looting of Arab homes in Qatamon” as a boy. Palestinians also lost art work, financial instruments and – like the Karmis – irreplaceable family records, as the fabric of a society and a way of life were destroyed.

Jerusalem return denied

The Karmis’ story is a variation of what happened to tens of thousands of Jerusalem-area Palestinians during the Nakba, in which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes all over the country and never allowed to return. (In my book One Country I describe the departure under similar circumstances of my mother’s family from Lifta-Romema.)

As of 1997, there were 84,000 living West Jerusalem refugees (23,000 born before 1948), according to Tamari. Half lived in the West Bank, many just miles from their original homes, but thousands of others were spread across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip.

Arab property is well-documented through administrative and UN records, but tracing the fate of an individual house or proving title is extremely difficult if not impossible for Palestinians scattered, exiled and forbidden from returning home. Some, who have foreign passports that allowed them to make brief visits, have attempted to locate their family properties. In recent years a small Israeli group called Zochrot (Remembering) has even joined in – taking some displaced Palestinians back to their original villages and homes, whose traces Israel often made deliberate efforts to conceal or destroy. But such activities are not welcomed by most Israeli Jews still in denial about their state’s genesis.

Ghada Karmi recalls an earlier attempt to revisit her family home in 1998. The residents were unwelcoming and would not give her the phone number of the landlord, though a plaque outside bore the name “Ben-Porat.”

The owner of the original, lower-level house at the time The New York Times bought the upper levels was Yoram Ben-Porat, an economics professor who became president of the Hebrew University and was killed with his wife and young son in a road accident in October 1992. According to Erlanger, the house remained with heirs from the Ben-Porat family who rented it out until it was sold in 2005 to an Israeli couple who did some remodeling. It is unknown when the Ben-Porats acquired the house or if they were the ones who had the upper levels built.

During Karmi’s 2005 visit, Erlanger invited her to see his part of the house and introduced her to the Israeli tenants in the lower level who gave her free access while Erlanger took photographs. For Karmi, revisiting the house was disconcerting. She described to The Electronic Intifada its occupants as “Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis, liberals, nice people who wanted to be nice.” She felt like asking them, “how can you live here knowing this is an Arab house, knowing this was once owned by Arabs, what goes through your mind?” But, she explained, “in the way people have of not wanting to upset people who appear to be nice, I didn’t say anything.”

The New York Times

In the early years after their original residents left, many of the former Arab neighborhoods were run down. But in the 1970s, wealthier Israeli Jews began to gentrify them and acquiring an old Arab house became a status symbol. Today, Israeli real estate agencies list even small apartments in Qatamon for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and house prices can run into the millions. In Jerusalem, such homes have become popular especially with wealthy American Jews, according to Pappe. The New York Times did not disclose what it paid for the Qatamon property.

It was a curious decision for The New York Times to have purchased part of what must obviously have been property with – at the very least – a political, moral and legal cloud over its title. Asked whether The New York Times or Friedman had made any effort to learn the history of the property, the newspaper responded, “Neither The Times nor Mr. Friedman knew who owned the original ground floor prior to 1948.”

As Friedman prepared to make the move to Jerusalem from Beirut where he was covering the Lebanon war in the early 1980s, The Times hired an Israeli real estate agent to help him locate a home. According to McCraw, Friedman’s wife Ann went ahead to Jerusalem and looked at properties “and she, working with the agent, made the selection for The Times.” During the process Friedman visited Jerusalem and looked at properties as well, a fact he mentions in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem. By the time the property was selected, Friedman had moved permanently to Jerusalem and oversaw the closing.

The choice of the Qatamon property – over several modern apartments that the real estate agent also showed – makes The New York Times a protagonist and interested party in one of the most difficult aspects of the Palestine conflict: the property and refugee rights of Palestinians that Israel has adamantly denied. It also raises interesting questions about what such choices have on news coverage – with which the newspaper itself has had to grapple.

In 2002, an Electronic Intifada article partly attributed the pervasive underreporting of Israeli violence against Palestinians to “a structural geographic bias” – the fact that “most US news organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are being killed and bombarded on a daily basis” ( Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah, “Killings of dozens once again called ‘period of calm’ by US media, 20 September 2002).

In 2005, The New York Times’ then Public Editor Daniel Okrent echoed this criticism, writing:

“The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this ‘structural geographic bias.’” (“The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine,” 24 April 2005).

Okrent recommended that in order to broaden the view of the newspaper’s reporters, it should locate a correspondent in Ramallah or Gaza – where she or he would share the daily experiences, concerns and risks of Palestinians. This advice went unheeded, just as Executive Editor Bill Keller recently publicly rejected the advice of the current public editor that current Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner should be reassigned because of the conflict of interest created by Bronner’s son’s voluntary enlistment in the Israeli army.

Thus, in a sense, Bronner’s structural and personal identification with Israel has become complete: when the younger Bronner joins army attacks in Gaza, fires tear gas canisters or live bullets at nonviolent demonstrators trying to save their land from confiscation in West Bank villages, or conducts night arrest raids in Ramallah or Nablus – as he may well be ordered to do – his father will root for him, worry about him, perhaps hope that his enemies will fall in place of his son, as any Israeli parent would. And on weekends, the elder Bronner will await his soldier-son’s homecoming to a property whose true heirs live every day, like millions of Palestinians, with the unacknowledged trauma, and enduring injustice of dispossession and exile.

#palestine #palestine history

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traumasurvivors · 1 year

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Here's a link to a blog post on my personal website on a topic that I think is very important.

I've also put it below the read more for people that don't like external links.

When it comes to healing from trauma, there are a lot of emotions an individual may feel. One of these emotions is anger. Anger is one of the emotions I see invalidated the most. For example, I’ve been told that being angry is “letting the person who hurt me win.” I’ve been told that I’m only hurting myself with my anger and that it’s holding me back from healing. All of these assumptions were wrong.

Anger is often viewed as a bad thing because it can drive a lot of unpleasant behaviours but it can be used for good. While anger can hurt you and others, it doesn’t have to. There is a difference between destructive anger and constructive anger. Destructive anger is often expressed in a way that causes harm to yourself or others whereas constructive anger can be used to better understand your situation and figure out your needs. Constructive anger can be a way to show respect for yourself.

For example, if you’re in a situation with a friend where they do something that makes you angry (for example: cancelling plans, forgetting an important date, etc), constructive anger may involve you stepping away from the situation to figure out the cause of your anger (for example: you feel their actions imply you’re not important to them) so that you can then sit down with your friend and communicate in a calm manner. This may allow your relationship to grow and build with a better understanding of each other. Destructive anger in this situation may involve you yelling at your friend and insulting them, which will likely damage or destroy the relationship. If the hurt your friend has caused makes you want to re-evaluate your friendship, this is valid and there are still constructive ways to end a friendship that will cause the least amount of hurt for all involved. It is also important to note that ignoring the anger and bottling up is likely to cause a bigger blow up down the line or cause “overreactions” to other circumstances.

If anger is bottled up, it can end up coming out unintentionally. You might find you’re getting much angrier at everyday annoyances and disagreements than you might think reasonable. People might push you away or respond badly to your anger, because they feel they do not deserve it - and looking back later, you might feel they don’t deserve it, either. However, because of the anger you’re holding back, you can’t see that in the moment. This is why it is important to think and consider your anger, and listen to what it’s trying to tell you. I have found asking questions of myself to analyze my anger can help, such as in an anger inventory like this one.

While many people see anger as an emotion that causes people to lash out and destroy things, anger can also help to motivate people to create new things. Marches to “Take back the night”, or for “gay pride” have much of their motivation based in anger at injustice and oppression. New laws to better protect survivors of domestic abuse or otherwise help society are often driven by people feeling a huge amount of anger. Properly harnessed, anger can help to take action to change things for the better.

On a more personal level, anger can also be a motivator to improve one’s own life. Many people have used the anger they felt at those who put them down as a motivation toward success. That success might be completing schooling, winning an international athletic competition or publishing a novel. One thing all of those have in common is that they are rarely possible to do with only a little time or a little effort. They are time-consuming tasks which usually require months if not years of work. They can be easy to give up on without motivation - and for many, anger is a big help to keeping that motivation.

It took me years to feel anger. For the first while, I felt ashamed, guilty and like I deserved the abuse I’d endured. Feeling angry at the people responsible for this was a step in my healing. I began putting the blame on those responsible and not myself. I was realizing that I did not deserve to be treated in the harmful ways that I was. This was huge to me as someone that had spent years thinking I deserved my trauma and as a result, future trauma and abuse as well.

There were instances where my anger was destructive, mostly to myself. I engaged in self-harm as a way to vent my anger and it also caused problems in my relationship at the time because I held my anger in and would get really frustrated and project my anger onto my relationship which was not fair to my partner.

Over the years, I’ve learned to cope with my anger more efficiently. What works for someone is largely dependent on them and their needs. For me, it was a literal punching bag to vent out frustrations and journaling. It was sitting down with my anger and treating it like a friend trying to protect me (because it was in a way). It was listening to it and finding the cause. My true anger came from those who hurt me, and in a way, took a part of me. My anger largely came from grief and betrayal. Understanding where it came from did not make it disappear, but it did offer me perspective and allow me to better manage it.

For some, anger is a cover up for other emotions. It becomes a defense mechanism against feeling the sadness, hurt and other emotions that a person does not want to feel. The anger is just the first layer and understanding where that anger comes from, and that the anger is a cover up is a great step in moving beyond it. Feeling the emotions beneath it will play a big part in moving beyond the anger.

Anger is a valid and understandable emotion when it comes to healing from trauma, even if your trauma does not have a specific person to blame (natural disasters and death of a loved one are examples). If the person who hurt you did not mean to or did not know better (like another child), anger is still a valid emotion. You’ve been hurt and you should not have been and it is reasonable to feel angry at this.

For a lot of us, anger plays a part in our healing. And that’s okay! You’re allowed to feel angry. Anger becomes an issue when you allow it to consume you and hurt you or others. The feeling itself is not inherently bad, and it can actually be a good thing. Your anger can be used to help you. It’s what you do with your anger that decides whether it’s helpful to you or not. When I was first told that my anger was “letting the other person win,” I believed that and felt invalidated. I have since realized that my anger has been an important part in understanding my pain and my needs. My anger is not letting someone else win, but letting me win, by helping me to heal.

#my blog posts #i am going to be gradually re-posting my posts #with text under a read more #to make them more accessible to people that don't like external links #anger

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soupthatistohot · 2 months

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A rant about why BSD is hard to enjoy right now (in my opinion)

Originally posted this on twitter but I think tumblr folks will sympathize, as well. So, here goes!

The stakes are simultaneously so ridiculously high and also nonexistent. I can't shake the feeling that everything is going to return to normal after this arc is over (everyone we care about will be alive, the world will have been saved), so why should I care about anything that's happening?

To that point -- no one (I care about) stays dead!! So what if Kunikida "died" in the chapter today? I'm sure he'll be back. Dazai also didn't die in Meursault, neither did Fyodor (who actually literally CAN'T die!!). Akutagawa is now alive and well, too! As much as I hate excessive MCD (like in JJK), you need to actually kill off characters sometimes if you're gonna threaten it so often, because then every death lacks emotional impact. I've been, like, numbed to it atp.

There are so many characters I do not know enough about to care about. Who even are the hunting dogs? Bram? Sigma? Asagiri hasn't put as much time and care into characterizing them as the main cast, so when things happen to them I kinda don't give a shit long-term. They were introduced in the middle of a convoluted plot that has taken such precedence over the characters who are supposed to be driving the story.

BSD originated as a character-driven story, and that's what drew myself and so many others to it in the first place. It was bizarre in a charming sort of way. It was about the characters growing and developing as people as much/more as it was about the external conflicts going on. It almost feels like Asagiri has been trying to be too clever about this that he's lost the core of BSD: it's heart.

Similarly, there's a reason this is such a ship-heavy fandom, we live for the character dynamics! But our beloveds have been scattered to the winds for literal years in our time that we've lost most of that interaction we love so much. Give us back our found family dynamics!!

Kind of back to the point about the convoluted plot -- it eels like the characters' intelligence has outgrown us and Asagiri, to the point of seeming impossibly ridiculous. Like what do you mean Chuuya was faking it the whole time and then stopped a bullet from entering dazai's skull and got away from it because of the security camera angle?? what do you mean Fyodor dying by a vampire's hand actually means that he subsumes bram and then he sets off a tripolar singularity to create god and this was his plan all along????

Obviously I don't speak for the whole fandom and these are just my opinions. I'm not saying you have to agree with me or even that BSD is horrible. I just feel like it's kinda lost its way the past few years and I miss the animanga I fell in love with :(

#bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #bsd analysis #bsd manga #bsd anime #bsd meta

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meatball-headache · 11 days

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BEHOLD MY MASTERPIECE!

300,000 words, 1600 pages, three mighty volumes of Meatball's Dungeon Extravaganza! It took forever to write, almost as long to format, and then I had to pay for the damn thing :p

And look! I've immortalized some of you with my favorite comments :)

This has been a tremendous effort and now it's finally, actually finished. And I just finished Dawntrail yesterday, the same day the package came :p How 'bout that.

So, now that these two huge projects are behind me, I have to rewind my brain to... god, last November? ...and remember what I do with myself all day long. Get back to "normal," as it were, whatever that means.

At any rate... it's been Quite A Time, lemme tell ya.

Oh! Fun fact: the background image of the first one is the original screenshot from my first run on Brayflox with my old FC. I found my old external drive :)

#meatball's dungeon extravaganza

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beelsari · 1 year

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Okay sooo I just read the "reacting to your heat" for both Beel and Mams and damn... 👀 i cant words but it's so good!

So I wanted to request either Lucifer or Diavolo for it. I cant decide which one so pick at your leisure! 😅

Either way thanks and have a good day/night!

OM! Brothers reacting to MC’s heat

Thank you!!! I really appreciate the love!! I hope you love this one just as much as I do, I have to say I definitely was into this!

Lucifers turn!!!

I plan on doing diavolo next!

SMUT mdni

Hard dom luci x gn reader

Lucifer

Lucifer is the one who first found out you’d experience a heat. He could smell the hormones coming, suddenly realizing your fate. He called a meeting in the dining hall of HoL to explain your heat to everyone, specifically to tell his brothers to keep their distance from you and there will be consequences if they do not obey his rules. Your heat came that night, taking complete control over you. It was so much harder to handle than you expected, you didn’t know how you were going to survive without someone’s help. You needed relief so bad but you alone didn’t do the trick. For the next couple days when you left your room you could sense how tense all the brothers were. All the brothers except for Lucifer, who externally is oozing calm. All the brothers are extremely confused and bewildered at how calm Lucifer is. How is he resisting your lust and hormones so easily? They all question internally while watching him. But what they dont know is that Lucifer is struggling the hardest. He puts on a show whenever you or his brothers are around but when he’s alone you would think he’s the one in heat. He’s constantly pleasing himself, trying to get some relief from you and your hormones that are constantly haunting him. He’s never had to fight against himself this hard. He wants you so bad but he’s scared he’d hurt you.

His resolve all dissolves one night when he hears a small series of taps on his door. He quirks his head up from his desk and strides to his door. He’s opens it to see you, hair and clothes disheveled, skin bright red and sweaty, and panting on your knees right in-front of him. “Luci please I can’t handle it anymore” you plead to him. he’s façade completely crumbles when he sees you. His sweet little thing beneath him begging for him to corrupt you. He groans immediately picking you up, locking the door, and throwing you on his bed. “You have no idea how much i’ve held back, just for you to whine like a slut for my dick” he groans as he hovers over you, teasing you with his words. You’re squirming underneath him begging for him to touch you. “You’re such an obedient doll, knowing to come to me, you’re mine darling dont you ever forget that” He says with a smirk while kissing your neck starvingly. You’re mouth is parted and whimpering the whole time he kisses you, making his cock impossibly harder. Knowing he’s making you sound like this makes him feral. He picks up onto your knees and stands infront of you, his bulge pressed against your face. “Here darling, this will make it all better, open up” he whispers to you. He pulls his cock out while shoving into your mouth. He begins to facefuck you while softly stroking your hair. He’s being so rough yet so loving with you and it’d driving you wild. he pulls out suddenly and flips you over onto your stomach. “I can’t wait anymore doll, i need to ruin your sweet sex” he moans while thrusting into you. “Please i need you inside so bad Luci! “You moan so sweetly for him, making it harder for him to not completely destroy you. He wants you braindead on his cock, and with what he has planned for you, you will be. “Fuck- take it love, all this is for you” he groans while leaning down, pressing his chest against your back to give you sweet kisses and hickies along your back. He’s also whispering the dirtiest words in your ears. Lucifer knows exactly how to please you, and he’ll do it all night and all day, however long it takes to finish your heat. He has to take care of his sweet doll.

#obey me #obey me x y/n #obey me! shall we date?#obey me brothers #obey me smut #obey me x mc #obey me x reader #obey me lucifer #obey me luci x reader #om! lucifer #lucifer x mc #lucifer avatar of pride #lucifer smut

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meguwumibear · 3 months

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A Night Out Dancing

Tomorrow your party will reach JuLai. Tonight Wolfwood wants to dance.

thank you @/firein-thesky for commissioning this piece for the @ficsforgaza collaboration

The sky above No Man’s Land is inky and starless. The air stale and still. Despite the hour, the world around you is oppressively warm and dry. Nights in the desert are usually bitterly cold. You’re not sure what’s gotten into the weather today.

Vash at least doesn’t seem plagued by strange temperature, but then Vash can sleep through anything, including Meryl’s jerky driving, so the comparison isn’t fair. Meryl’s fast asleep too, tucked neatly into the driver’s seat. You watch her toss and turn for a while, wondering what she dreams of. Someplace nice, hopefully. Somewhere lush and flourishing and green.

Even Roberto seems to have found sleep, albeit at the bottom of a bottle. He’s snoring gently in the passenger seat, mouth wide open, empty liquor bottle still clutched tightly in his hands.

Seems everyone’s immune to the hot desert night but you.

There’s a chance it isn’t the heat keeping you up. It’s possible you’re making excuses, blaming the external world around you for your insomnia so you don’t have to turn inward, so you don’t have to confront your building anxieties about what the future holds for your little traveling party. It’s going to crack and splinter apart, isn’t it? Like that land mass you once read about in a book that spoke of some far away planet called Earth. Pangaea. A supercontinent forced apart by shifting tectonic plates.

Tomorrow, you’ll reach JuLai, and everyone will drift away from you. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to remember what it felt like to be whole.

Fuck it. If you’re not gonna get some shut eye, you may as well make yourself useful.

Wolfwood is perched on a sand dune, resting against his cross shaped gun, lit cigarette in hand, nearly burnt down to the filter. He takes one final drag of it as he sees you approach, then snubs the thing out in the sand.

“I’ll take over the watch,” you tell him, eyes drawn to the little ‘o’ shape his mouth makes as he lazily releases the final dregs of smoke.

“Not your turn yet, sweetheart,” he replies. “Go back to sleep.”

If only you could.

“Haven’t been able to. Too much shit on my mind. No sense in my staring at the back of my eyelids when I could be doing this instead.”

Wolfwood stares at you through tinted shades he hasn’t bothered to remove despite the darkness of the night. The glasses are a part of his costume, of his carefully crafted mask that even after months of travelling together he’s still hiding behind. He told you he’s an undertaker, but he dresses like a priest. On a runaway Sandsteamer, you learn he is an orphan. You’ve learned nothing since.

“You should take better care of yourself,” he says, as if caring for yourself is easy.

“You’re one to talk,” you reply, eyes giving him a quick once over. It’s been a few days since you’ve spent the night somewhere with a working bathroom. Without a mirror or razor, the stubble on his chin has grown more and more pronounced. The hairs suit him, you think. Your fingers itch to run along his jaw.

“You’re staring,” he observes, mouth crooking into a smug grin because the undertaker or priest or whatever the fuck he is knows how handsome he is.

“Am I?”

Wolfwood stands slowly, brushing beads of sand off him as he does so. You try to keep your eyes on his face, on the slope of his nose, the dimples on his cheeks, but they wander anyway, along his broad shoulders, down his tiny waist. You’ll miss him when this is over, you decide.

“Wanna dance?” he asks suddenly. The question throws you off kilter. How long has it been since you’ve done something so mundane? Will you even remember how? Is it appropriate to dance given what tomorrow may bring?

“What about-”

“Needle-noggin and the lot are out like a light. No one will notice if we steal a few minutes for ourselves.”

He closes the gap between the two of you and links his right hand with yours, fingers interlocking. His hands are large and calloused from lugging around that heavy gun of his. Briefly, you wonder just how strong the guy really is.

“But there isn’t any music,” you protest weakly. Wolfwood is frustratingly good at sapping away your resolve.

“Don’t need any. We’ll make our own,” he insists, slipping an arm around the small of your back and pressing you close, closer, and closer still.

This close to him, you can see deep into his eyes. There’s fear in them. Sadness too. He’s trying and failing to mask the emotions with a smile, with this dance. It must be so exhausting, you think, always having to pretend.

“One dance,” you surrender, relaxing into his embrace. He smells sharply of tobacco and nicotine, though you note hints of something a bit earthier underneath. Sweat, probably. It’s been a while since any of you have showered. “Then bed. Unlike you and Vash, some of us need our beauty sleep.”

A lopsided grin swims across his handsome face.

“Aw, think I’m beautiful, sweetheart? That’s nice.”

There’s a biting remark on the tip of your tongue that never fully forms. Yeah, actually, you do think he’s beautiful. You’ve thought so ever since Meryl slammed the news van into him all those months ago. The impact should have killed him—it would’ve killed you—but Wolfwood simply rose up from the sand as if rising from an interrupted slumber. Beautiful, even with rivulets of blood trickling down his face.

“Shut up,” you hiss, cheeks heating as you think a bit too intensely about his sturdy body which is now pressed flush against your own. Has Wolfwood always been this tall? This large? His giant frame engulfs you as the two of you sway together, in tandem with Wolfwood’s quiet humming.

You rest your head against his sternum, listening to the sound of his heart beating quick and urgent like the wings of a bird. His chest vibrates as he hums his tune. You can’t seem to place the song. Likely, he’s making it up as he goes, the tempo slow and somber like a dirge.

“Where’d you learn to dance?” you ask him, conscious of the way your two left feet have nearly tripped him up twice. Lucky for you both he’s not just a hulking lump of muscle. He’s got a great center of balance too.

You chalk your awkwardness up to the loose, shifting sands and not to the odd sensation forming in the pit of your stomach. More unfamiliar than unpleasant. You swallow a few times in an attempt to settle it.

Wolfwood shrugs, spinning the two of you round and round in circles. “It’s not all that different than fighting.”

There’s truth to that, you suppose, remembering the fight on the Sandsteamer. Wolfwood refused to talk about the stranger you all watched disappear into the open maw of the sand ocean, but it was obvious the man once meant something to him.

“You’re thinking too much,” he says. “Just follow my lead.”

So you do. You let him whirl you around the desert dunes for what feels like hours, grinning up at him through thick lashes when you manage to step on his toes. Again. He laughs, a little too loudly, and you have to remind him that if he’s not careful he’ll wake your sleeping companions.

“What are you going to do if everything goes well tomorrow?”

For the first time all night, it’s Wolfwood who stumbles. The misstep is small, slight, if you weren’t so entangled, you may have missed it, but you are entangled so you feel everything. You feel his feet stall as the question leaves your lips. You feel the rise and fall of his belly as he takes a deep steadying breath.

His hand travels up the length of your spine, coming to rest at the nape of your neck. He thumbs across your vertebrae and you recognize the ministration for what it is: a silent plea for you to let the topic drop and just enjoy this moment the two of you managed to carve out for yourselves amidst all the chaos of the world.

You let your head drop once more, tucking it beneath his collarbone, right above his heart, still rabbiting in his chest. He isn’t humming anymore. There’s nothing to help the two of you keep time as you continue to sway together, now gliding across the sand like worms.

Around you, the clouds begin to clear and bright, twinkling stars start to peek out from behind them. A soft breeze kicks up around you, and the sand particles scatter with it. Wolfwood—Nicholas—keeps you pressed against him as the temperature mercifully begins to drop.

Your mind still wanders from time to time, curious what tomorrow may bring.

Who cares, you decide. It doesn’t matter.

Tonight, you’re content to dance.

#ficsforgaza #trigun x reader #trigun x you #wolfwood x reader #wolfwood x you #nicholas d wolfwood x reader #nicholas d wolfwood x you

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jaeyunluvbot · 3 months

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[ RECKLESS DRIVING ! ]

chapter twelve. dinner date

𝜗𝜚 You and Jake arrived at the restaurant after a short drive, talking and listening to music the whole way. You found his music taste endearing and appreciated how similar it was to your own. You also found his singing adorable. He'd look over at you every so often to make sure you were enjoying it too.

The two of you were seated at a semi-secluded booth, with Jake taking charge of looking over the menu and deciding what to order. As he looked over the menu, you looked at him, noticing just how stunning he looked in the dim restaurant lighting. When he finally decided on what to order and the waiter came over to take the order, he turned his full attention to you, asking about your day and work.

You blushed slightly under the feeling of his eyes on you, hoping it wasn't noticeable, especially since you couldn't blame it on the cold this time. "You look so cute today, Y/N." He offered you a compliment after a moment of silence, desperately wanting to talk more.

"Thanks, Jake, you look good too," you replied, feeling a little flutter in your heart at his kind words.

"So tell me about soccer, isn't your season almost over?" you asked, not wanting to come off as awkward or standoffish with your short response to his compliment.

"Yeah, we have a few games left, then maybe playoffs if we do well for the rest of the season." Jake smiles and you can tell he's passionate about his sport.

"I'm sure you guys will do well. I don't know too much about soccer, but from what I've seen, you guys are an amazing team." You gave him a quick thumbs up and he giggled. Internally, you were dying from the sound that just escaped his mouth, but externally you didn't show it.

"Now I wanna know about you. I feel bad that we never talked before the other day."

You laughed. "Ok, I'm an elementary education major, my favorite color is pink, and, ummm, I can't really think of anything else."

"Elementary education? How'd you pick that? Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course!" He backpedaled quickly, not wanting you to think he's judging your chosen course of study.

"I just really enjoy working with kids and I know how a good teacher can impact a student's life, so I wanted to be able to do something like that, you know?"

He agreed and stated that he admires people who can work with kids, claiming they stress him out. You agreed, but said that the pros outweigh the cons.

Time passed and the two of you talked more, generally getting to know each other as you ate. The atmosphere was pleasant and calm, filled with a soft happiness that emanated from both of you. Once the bill was paid and the meal was finished, and you and Jake headed back out to his car, you felt a hint of sadness that your time together was ending.

"So I know you only agreed to dinner, but would it be too much to go to an arcade or something? I know a really fun one close to here," Jake said, making your heart flutter once again.

"That sounds fun, but don't you have practice tomorrow morning? I don't want you to be too tired..." you said hesitantly.

"Yeah, but it'll be fine. I'm not even tired yet, plus it's only 10:15, so I can still get a good amount of sleep later."

"Then let's go."

He grinned and gave you a high five. "You're the best." 𝜗𝜚

𝜗𝜚 author's note - y/n getting hate we DO NOT love to see it, but i needed to add some drama so i can make myself sad. ignore if the writing is shitty it's 6 am and i haven't slept. like and leave a comment pretty please.

𝜗𝜚 taglist - @jakesaverse @haechansbbg @n1k1mura @dreamiestay @lilifiedeans @rikisly @nctsshoes2 @dojaejunging @noobgod1269 @bluxjun @soobieboobiedoobiedaboobie

#kpop #jake sim x y/n #jake sim x you #jake sim x reader #jake sim #jaeyunluvbot #kpop smau #enhypen smau #enhypen #sim jaeyun x you #sim jaeyun x reader #sim jaeyun #college au #university au #enhypen fluff

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theshadowsingersraven · 3 months

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Can I just say that as someone who is in this for Azriel's HEA primarily, E/riels are most frequently the ones who remove his depth in favor of their ship? And it drives me insane. I've interacted with a few, probably 4-5, that can at least agree that he has a tendency to go for unattainable women/women he puts on a pedestal. A few can at least agree he has a very apparent hero complex.

But a lot of them, especially on Tiktok, will not entertain any analysis at all if it's even neutral towards their ship. They refuse to believe Azriel has a clear hero complex, and that it's not a coincidence that he has a pattern of trying "save" a female from one of Beron's sons. First Mor with Eris, now Elain with Lucien. They refuse to believe he's biased and is likely projecting his own perceived "failures" to protect his mom, too.

But that's what makes him so interesting to me! The way he falls into these self-punishing patterns. The way he projects his frustrations outwards and thinks nothing of himself and how jealous and lonely that makes him. And they ignore all of that! Gwynriels, Eluciens, and Azrises have all been willing to at least hear these types of analysis.

But E/riels ignore that Azriel, base level, is actually pretty kind and considerate. Yes, he absolutely has walls and walls built up and a mask perpetually, so it's not easy to see. Yes, he tortures people as part of his job. So those things definitely helped hide those traits, but he thing that clued me in was the first time he was vulnerable with Feyre. When she confessed that she didn't feel like she belonged anywhere as a Made fae, Azriel tells her that after 500 years, he doesn't feel like he's found where he belongs either.

And given that Azriel, per Rhys, is nearly impossible to make "break" or say anything he doesn't want to, that reads to me as genuine. He's willing to let that guard down a little bit if it means he can help someone. And that's only the first moment he has with her.

But E/riels will insist that everything he did for Elain is special, that he wouldn't do it for anyone else.

I'm sorry, Mr. "Be careful how you speak about my High Lady" wouldn't go save Feyre or Nesta in Hybern? He wouldn't give Feyre or Nesta Truth-Teller to protect themselves once he saw them refuse Cassian’s knife and determine they needed something more to feel comfortable? He wouldn't sit and talk with Feyre or Nesta for a long time about their interests, despite the fact that Azriel and Feyre played a game at Rita's where they bet on which person in the club would try to make a move on Rhys? He wouldn't spend time with Nesta even though he got her a thoughtful book light and accepted her hug? Even though she is the only person we've seen him directly mention loving, literally from his own mouth, per CC3?

He would. He would do that. Azriel is traumatized and externally cold, yes, but it's clear he is generally thoughtful and considerate towards the Inner Circle. Those are his people. Actively taking away his depth by lessening his kindness in favor of a ship is such a disservice to his character and the hints that we have towards what I believe will be his later complexity.

#pro azriel #anti e/riel #anti ewriel #antielriel #azriel acotar #cc3 spoilers

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niqhtlord01 · 1 year

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Humans are weird: Depression

Alien: Can you explain something to me?

Human: Sure.

Alien: What is depression?

Human: *Stops to ponder question*

Human: I think I can explain, but you must follow me somewhere.

*Pair walk the streets of a dark city*

*Human stops in front of a window and shines a light at it*

Human: What do you see?

Alien: *Looks upon an intricate work of stained glasses depicting some form of human religious scene*

Alien: The work of a master craftsman whose beauty outshines their time.

Human: Wow; wasn’t expecting a deep and meaningful answer.

Human: I would have accepted “a work of art” or “beautiful glass” as an answer.

Alien: How does this help explain what depression is?

Human: Watch.

*Human turns off the light*

Human: Look at the window again.

Alien: *Looks up at the window*

*Where once there was beauty now there was a haunting image*

*Gone were the bright colors and shapes, and what remained were abstract shapes that blurred together in the darkness*

Alien: I see….sadness.

Human: Exactly.

Human: Depression is the creeping darkness in the corners of our minds.

Human: Always present, always waiting for a moment to swallow us whole and leave us shadows of our former selves.

Alien: But that can’t be.

Alien: When the light was showing things were beautiful, there were no shadows.

Human: No?

*Turns light back on again*

Human: What do you see; and look carefully this time.

Alien: *Looks a second time but is confused*

*Things appear the same as first time he shun a light on the window. Only after expanding his gaze did he notice what the human was implying*

Alien: The light is surrounded by shadow…..

Human: Exactly.

Human: Think of the light as our internal happiness.

Human: Even when we feel happy and carefree just as the window appears in the light, the shadows of depression can still exist just at the edge of our being.

Alien: *Looks at the flashlight*

Alien: The light will eventually die, so does that mean your people will always succumb to depression?

Human: Some people do.

Human: Sometimes the light just goes out and never comes back.

Human: Other times they do find the light but it is flickering so they spend the rest of their lives trying to find it again.

Human: Everyone is different with how they handle their own depression.

Alien: Are you depressed?

Human: *Shrugs* I’ve had my bad days; when the weight of the world felt like it was driving the air from my lungs.

Alien: You seem well rounded, so I take it you found your light?

Human: The trick is to not rely on external light, but to find the one inside of you.

Human: That way you’ll never be in the dark.

Alien: Is that even possible?

*Pair of them turn to see a new light coming from inside the building*

*Someone inside had lit a candle and placed it under the stained glass*

Human: Nothing’s impossible.

#humans are insane #humans are space oddities #humans are space orcs #humans are weird #scifi #story #writing #original writing #niqhtlord01 #inspiring #depression

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badolmen · 1 year

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“I’m scared to pirate stuff - ” do it scared!*

*with Firefox and Adblock and a VPN and -

If you want a nonspecific, nonexhaustive “where do I even start” guide…

Sail the cyber seas at your own risk!

Streaming - “I want to watch xyz”

This is normally what most people want when they talk about pirating.

Use Firefox with uBlock Origin and additional privacy add-ons such as PrivacyBadger, TrackMeNot, etc.

Free VPNs are out there. Get one - but vet it’s efficacy. My go-tos are Proton VPN, or Windscribe if you plan to do a bit of torrenting.

What is torrenting? How does it work? Here’s a guide!

Back to streaming -

Make sure that a) you’ve got your Mozilla browser with all its adblocking private glory, and b) you’ve got a VPN turned on to hide what you’re doing in that browser from your ISP (internet service provider).

Now you need to actually find a site to stream from. This is the tricky part, because openly sharing these sites will get them taken down if they’re talked about widely enough. (Remember how tiktok idiots got zlibrary taken down?)

You’re going to have to talk to people on forums. You’re going to have to experiment with sites you find yourself. Search for ‘x online free’ and look at the links that come up - is the preview text mangled or clickbaitey? Are there Reddit threads about that website confirming or denying its content? A good rule of thumb is to ignore the top result or two - copycats of good streaming sites will often buy out the top result spot. Eventually, you’ll develop a good gut feeling and understanding of what a good site ‘looks like’ from the results page alone.

However, there are some places that compile good sites that haven’t been nuked by lawyers (yet) - check out r/FMHY! The masterposts are actively curated and updated when a site goes down or is found to have malicious downloads.

Remember - loose lips sink ships. No tweeting (xeeting?) or Facebook statuses about your new favorite piracy website and where you found it. Even posting to tumblr (kind of like this…) isn’t a great idea if you want those websites to stay under the radar and stay accessible. Nobody talks, everybody walks (away with their share of pirate booty)

If you aren’t downloading media, pick pretty much any site and watch away! Adblock and Firefox will keep away pop-ups and other annoying ads, and your VPN means your ISP can’t tell that you’re visiting an unofficial streaming service.

Note: In my experience, I’ve never heard of visiting a site and watching stuff on it infecting or otherwise compromising your computer. That tends to come from misclicks on invisible or overwhelming pop-up ads that redirect you to an automatic download or similarly malicious bullshit. If you’re using Firefox and uBlock, you shouldn’t be in any danger of an accidental redirect.

Downloads - “I want to keep xyz”

This is the realm of pirate archiving - you’re keeping files physically on your hard drive, an external hard drive, or burning a disk.

Adblock + Firefox browser? Check. VPN on? Check.

Go to your streaming site of choice - most if not all have download options. You can download those files or, manually, right click and save the video file from the webpage as an mp4. I honestly don’t know if there’s a difference in quality or more danger in clicking the download buttons, but regardless -

Run that puppy through VirusTotal.com! It’s a reliable browser based virus checker - if the file is too large, use a local virus checking program (your native Windows Defender on Windows computers or, I prefer, Malwarebytes)

Generally mp4 and mp3 files are clean - choose where to save them for the long term, and bam! Free forever media.

Optionally, I also upload mp4 files to a named Google document - this way I can easily share them or make them findable through a ‘xyz Google doc’ search for others :]

Torrents - “I want to keep and share xyz”

I’m not going to go into this subject in depth because, honestly, it’s not something I do regularly.

See the previously linked Torrenting guide for information on how the process works, and check out r/FMHY for recommendations and warnings about different torrenting clients (I’ve personally only used qBittorrent - I’ve heard to stay away from the Pirate Bay and Bittorrent.)

As with streaming, turn on that VPN baby! You’re going to need one that supports peer-to-peer (p2p) connections, so Proton’s free version is a no-go. Windscribe is what I’ve used for torrenting (and it’s a good free VPN on its own - I’m just partial to Proton). You get 10GB every month on Windscribe’s free version, which is more than enough for a few movies/a season or two of your favorite show.

(Bigger torrents like video games are easily 30+ GB, so be prepared to either pay for a no-limit premium account or spend a few months downloading your files in chunks.)

VPN on? Double check.

Boot up your torrenting client - I use a slightly out of date version of qBittorent, but there are other options. The Reddit thread and previously linked torrenting guide have a few dos and donts of selecting a client, so be thorough before you download your client of choice.

This is getting into the logistics of torrenting a bit, so forgive me if this is vague or incorrect, but now you need a torrent seed. These will be .tor files found through pirating websites or archives - these are rarely malicious, but it’s good to run any piracy related download through something like VirusTotal.com or scan it with a local program like Malwarebytes.

You open your seed file in your client and wait. A ‘healthy’ seed tends to have lots of seeders and few leeches, but sometimes you’re stuck with an obscure seed you just have to wait for.

Your torrented files have fully downloaded! Now what? a) keep your client open and seed those files for others as long as you want to - sharing is caring! and b) run those files through a security program like Malwarebytes (not sponsored it’s just the only program I’m familiar with).

Be wary of what gets flagged - sometimes the files seem important, but are just trojans, and likewise sometimes they seem malicious, but are just cracked software getting flagged by your system. It’s good to check and see if others have had a problem with this particular torrent before - Reddit threads from 2008 are your long dead friends.

And that’s about it. Feel free to correct me if anything I’ve recommended is malicious or outright wrong. I’ve been doing this for years and haven’t had an active problem to my knowledge, so if there is something fishy with how I do things, I am a statistical outlier and should not be counted.

I wish you smooth sailing and strong winds in your ventures me hearties!

Obligatory ‘don’t pirate small author’s or artist’s works what the fuck dude’ statement.

#ra speaks #piracy #pirating #pirate to make hondo ohnaka proud #I’ve seen so many people on my streaming piracy post bemoaning that they don’t know how like !!!!#congrats you get to learn without the middle school trial and error phase we zillenials had (RIP family computer 2004-2009)#I genuinely think piracy has gotten easier/safer than it used to be. that or I’ve gotten smarter. which is also likely.

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