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YOU'VE JUST BEEN ISEKAI'D!

You know how it is. You were hit by a truck or fell from a great height, and now you're trapped in a fantasy land! Quick, spin this wheel to find out what you've reincarnated as!

Remember to show this to all your friends :)

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🌍✨ A Voice from Gaza: Holding onto Hope ❤️‍🩹

Hi, my name is Mosab, and I just want to take a moment to say thank you. Your kindness, your generosity, and your willingness to listen have meant more to me and my family than I can ever express.

When I first shared my story, I didn’t know what to expect. I was scared, exhausted, and uncertain if anyone would care. But you did. You showed up. And because of you, hope feels a little less distant today.

💛 Our Journey So Far

With your support, we’ve been able to find small moments of relief in the midst of overwhelming hardship. Every donation, every share, and every kind message has given us the strength to keep going.

But our struggle isn’t over. Every day, we are reminded of what we’ve lost and the challenges that still lie ahead.

🏠 Still Searching for Stability: We are doing everything we can to secure a safe and steady future. 😢 The Pain of Loss Never Fades: The absence of 25 loved ones weighs heavily on us every day. 💔 Dreams Still on Hold: Survival takes all our strength, but we still believe in rebuilding.

🚀 How You Can Help Us Keep Going

Even the smallest act of kindness can make a difference:

💛 A $10 donation may seem small, but to us, it’s a lifeline. 💛 A reblog can help us reach someone who can support us.

If you can’t donate, just sharing this post helps more than you know. Every share is another chance for someone to see our story, to care, and to help.

🙏 You Are Part of Our Story

Your support isn’t just about donations—it’s about reminding us that we are not forgotten. That there is still kindness in the world. That even in the darkest times, there are people who care.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for helping us get this far. You are part of our story now.

With love and endless gratitude, Mosab and Family ❤️

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Of Bones and Body Horror: Bad to the Bone and How JoJo Weaponizes Fear

While this essay focuses on Stand design for the main villains of JoJo, it is also meant to explain the creation process for Boney and his Stand, Bad to the Bone, in Iron Touch. Spoilers for Chapter 38 of Iron Touch and all of canon JoJo below!

In recent years, I feel there's been a push for villains and antagonists in fiction to be sympathetic to the heroes and audience, usually with the endgame of redeeming them by the end of the story. While this is a perfectly fine character archetype, my favorite type of villains are the ones that you love to hate. You understand why they do the things they do, but you do not want them to succeed or have a happy ending. Someone you can rally against and want to see the protagonist defeat. Whether they're a misunderstood friend or a brutal tyrant, though, the main antagonist of any given story must pose a challenge for the protagonist, and in the context of a JoJo part, I think the best way to do that is through fear.

While the Grand Marshal was also designed with these principals in mind (suppression and mind control are both Very Scary™), it's with Boney and Bad to the Bone that I think I best executed the concept of fear and intimidation in a villain. Besides, at this point, I consider Boney to be more of a """"main"""" antagonist than the Grand Marshal is.

When making a character/ability designed to invoke fear in a shonen story, there's two key concepts that you should keep in mind.

First of all, it needs to seem unbeatable. This isn’t just a villain we’re talking about, this is the main villain. Whenever the audience sees their ability in action, they should think "how the hell are the heroes going to beat that?" They should be a step above everyone else at first glance, otherwise it won’t feel like there’s as much of a threat for the protagonist to overcome. This is where I came up with Boney's resurrective ability. If you see someone die and die and die over and over again, to the point where they just casually kill themselves and come back fine later, how can someone ever expect to truly defeat them? That, and it had two bonus points going for it: it goes against a fundamental rule of Stands that Jotaro lays out ("no Stand can revive the dead"), and it parallels Diavolo's ultimate fate at the end of Vento Aureo.

The second thing is a little more complicated. The ability itself should invoke fear. Any superpower can be scary in the right environment; you can put a guy with super strength in a series where none of the other characters have any special powers and he'll seem scary by default. That's not what I mean. Something about the ability should be fundamentally terrifying.

To better explain what I mean, let's compare Dio and Dio. Err, I mean, Dio and DIO

Designing for Intimidation vs. Designing for Fear

I don't care what anyone says, Dio is a great villain. He's this perfect Satanic archetype that the story expertly frames and builds towards as a powerful adversary, the ultimate threat. He's egotistical, calculating, weirdly charismatic, and most importantly, scary. Both Phantom Blood Dio and Stardust Crusaders Dio convey the feeling of fear extremely well, but they both do it in different ways. You can best see this through their respective abilities.

The vampires in JoJo have some pretty scary abilities. There's the classic blood sucking and healing factor, but then you get the really weird shit like the Space Ripper Stingy Eyes. Compared to other JoJo parts, though, Phantom Blood is a much "lower level" story. That first fight with Dio in the mansion after he rejects his humanity perfectly shows just how strong and durable Dio has become after using the Stone Mask, but it's only as tense as it is because at that point in the story, none of the other characters have any sort of super powers. Put any Stand user worth their salt up against Dio there and suddenly the fight becomes much more even.

Also, really think of the powers that Dio has in Phantom Blood. Super strength, a healing factor, some ice abilities, laser eyes...none of these are really scary on their own, right? You can all find those abilities on an X-Men lineup. I'm not saying that makes them bad or Phantom Blood Dio a bad villain, but he's made scary through his actions and narrative framing more so than just his powers on their own. Dio isn’t an effective villain because he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, he’s an effective villain because he tried to poison the protagonist’s father and fed a baby to its newly zombified mother.

Ironically, I think the scariest of Dio's abilities are the one he neglects to use in combat. He hypnotizes/mind controls a guy at one point and he somehow creates a bunch of grotesque zombie chimeras out of different people and animals. He does send a bunch of these chimeras out after Jonathan, but most of the time they feel like generic grunts rather than imposing monsters or tragic victims.

Compare this to Dio in Stardust Crusaders. The World is as scary as it is iconic, and I think part of the reason that it is so iconic is because of how scary it is. While it does lose some of its fear factor after Jotaro realizes he also has the same ability, it remains a horrifying ability nonetheless.

Time stop goes beyond just intimidating the way something like super strength and laser eyes are. Even if Dio wasn't a vampire, he would still be terrifying with The World (his vampirism just adds some extra sauce to it by making him especially strong and sturdy). It stops everything, everywhere, with just a call of its name. There's nothing you can do against Dio; in fact, you won't even be aware of what he's doing until its already over with. Rewatch the scenes where Dio kills Kakyoin and stabs Joseph in the throat, or even when he surrounds Jotaro with a shit ton of knives. They're all helpless, oblivious to the fact that they're about to die. That is scary.

What makes it even better is that the whole part builds up to this reveal. As early as the Steely Dan fight, the Crusaders beg and bargain with Dio's cronies to reveal the secret to his Stand, and we even get to see little out of context demonstrations of it later on in the part (like when Hol Horse tries to shoot Dio or when Dio moves Polnareff down the stairs). The fan speculation surrounding what the hell The World's ability was must've been wild at the time of Stardust Crusaders' initial release. While the reveal doesn't have the same impact it once had, those early readers must've been blown away back in the day.

Dio is not the only JoJo villain that's framed like this. Killer Queen installs a certain paranoia that anything someone touches could literally blow up in their face, King Crimson weaponizes disorientation and the idea of not being fully in control of your body/actions, and Whitesnake takes the idea of wiping your memories up to eleven by outright stealing them. Even ignoring Stand abilities for a second, Kira and Doppio/Diavolo use the idea of a devil hiding in plain sight while Pucci and especially Valentine exploit their positions of power for their own gain.

Now, back to Boney. In addition to his resurrective ability, I wanted something that truly scared me on a personal level. After all, there are a bunch of ways you could bring someone back to life. Michelle even anxiously rambles some of them off in Chapter 35. But that wasn't good enough for me. It needed to be scary.

Transformational body horror is something that I've always been scared by. I think my first exposure to anything like that was that one episode of SpongeBob where he spends the whole segment slowly morphing into a snail (as I'm writing this, I'm wondering if this episode is also what gave me my fear of needles, given that a syringe is what starts the transformation). I'm 24 now and I still can't watch that episode. David Cronenberg's The Fly is the scariest movie I've ever seen purely because of the vile, nauseating body horror on display throughout most of the film. I remember accidentally stumbling across a transformation porn story on DeviantArt as a kid (I didn’t even realize it was a fetish thing until I was much older) and being completely revolted by it. This shit freaks me the hell out. Our bodies are our most personal aspects of ourselves; so having them be forcefully, non-consensually violated and mutated into someone else, something else is perhaps one of the most sickening experiences I can imagine.

So of course I had to put it in Iron Touch!

It was precisely that disgust and terror that I wanted to convey with Bad to the Bone. Boney doesn't just die, he doesn't just take you down with him, he forces you to become him. Against your will, you are forced to metamorphosize into an adult man, feeling every muscle and bone twist and contort into something definitively not your own, and that will be the last thing you experience before your soul is overridden and erased forever. That is scary.

I decided to have Bad to the Bone be activated by touch because it was specific enough for Boney to have control over while also being inconspicuous enough to feel like a threat in every day life. It's got that Killer Queen feel to it; anything Kira touches can turn into a bomb, while anyone Boney touches can turn into him. Since Iron Touch and most of its main cast was conceptualized in mid-2020, I wouldn't be surprised if certain current events at the time also influenced this aspect of the Stand.

Another thing I find interesting is that while JoJo does body horror a lot, it generally doesn't freak me out or make me uncomfortable. I can watch Rohan turn people into books just fine, I can watch Jolyne unravel herself into string without a sweat, I can watch Cioccolata dissolve people into mold no problem. Characters get dismembered, cut in half, stabbed, punched, crushed, burned alive, and even decapitated and I don't flinch. The only time the anime ever made me scared or uncomfortable through its body horror was when Dio's bone started turning everyone into plants in Stone Ocean (I remember some of the stuff with the Corpse Parts freaking me out in Steel Ball Run, but its been a while since I've read it and I don't feel like going back and looking for the specific panels that gave me the heebie jeebies).

I think what separates people turning into plants from something like Heaven's Door is the process between the two. There's no great effort of Heaven's Door turning into people into books, nor do they fully turn into books, their face just peels open like a book and they've got a bunch of pages underneath (oh, and Okuyasu's arm got all twisty I guess). That sounds a lot more graphic than it actually is. It's too instantaneous and fantastical to freak me out. Holes may start to show up in Jolyne's skin as she unravels herself into string, but she's also always fully in control of this ability and there's never any gore shown underneath the exposed skin. These abilities don't convey that sense of a forceful, even painful metamorphosis the same way that something like The Fly does, no matter how overpowered or deadly they are. That's what freaks me out about the plant guy in Stone Ocean. The sequence in the anime where his eye turns into a flower is expertly animated, but god damn it made me feel sick.

So, that's how I came up with Bad to the Bone. But that's just me. What does all this talk about fear and body horror do for you?

For people writing JoJo fanparts or stories heavily inspired by JoJo, I hope that this serves as a helpful guide for conceptualizing your main villains. One of the biggest hurdles I see people come across when writing a story like this is Stand development, with the main protagonist and antagonist being the biggest source of frustration among up and coming authors. While protagonists are another beast entirely, for antagonists, people often get caught up in making their Stand the strongest or most complex thing they can think of. From what I've seen, this usually doesn't go well. Instead, focus on what scares you. The main villain should be the last person you'd want to fight, so you'd better give them a good reason for that.

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I'm autisic and I find eye contact really uncomfortable so nobody will challenge me to a trainer battle. Do you know of any other ways to start a battle?

of course. you can always just go up and ask someone if they want to battle personally, no one really considers that out-of-standard anymore.

or you can just hit them with the ol Belly Drum + STAB Earthquake. they Will get the memo

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we’reくコ:彡 entering squid territory

 くコ:彡                                                                       くコ:彡                              くコ:彡  くコ:彡                                                        くコ:彡                           くコ:彡 くコ:彡

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“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.”

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.

For Finkelstein’s repost of Kanazi’s words, the college determined that their employee of nine years had violated its equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies.

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she summoner on my duels til i max favor

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There she is! It’s The Old Psychic Lady With The Evil Eye Who Reads Fortunes And Knows Everything Before It Happens!

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Y'all!!! Emergency!!!

Your Esims are also helping Palestinians in Jenin!!

Instructions & Discount codes

Truly Esim

Thank you @anneemay for the notice

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Remember to click to send aid to Palestine today!

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It’s Esde, my fire emblem fates oh cee™️, again!

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Hey so it's come to my attention that the Creators of Disco Elysium want you to share the game and not give the company who took over and fired them (illegally)?) any profits off of their ideas and work, and I originally joined tumblr 2 weeks ago when that post was going around about the Steam sale and how you should [Skull and Crossbones flag] it instead.

So.

in light of that.

Check the replies/notes of this post :)

I was informed that posts containing links in them aren't findable in the search so i'll just.... drop a link in a seperate reboot :)

first things first though, copy this key:

q4-EJ9G2DV7MYYI-Vs0KdQ

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(poll idea courtesy of @wayslidecool)

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Stop for a while. do not cross . My name is Amna from Gaza. We lost everything, home, dreams, and everything that gives life. My children are living in bad conditions. I ask you to help me for the sake of my children, for the sake of humanity. Those who cannot donate can share the post and link

@occupationsurfer @northgazaupdates @nabulsi @elierlick @evelyn-art-05 @soon-palestine @fairuzfan @bibyebae @riding-with-the-wild-hunt

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PLEASE DON'T SKIP!

Please consider SHARING or DONATING, thank you! ❤️🍉

Day 258, still alive.🇵🇸🍉

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This disability pride month can we be mad that Israel has made it so more than ten children a day lose a limb in Gaza? Can we be mad that there isn't a single fully functioning general hospital in Gaza, thanks to the Israeli army's bombings? Can we be mad that there are disabled people in Palestine who don't have access to the care they need? Can we be mad that there are disabled people in Gaza that are dying due to the lack of medicine and doctors? Can we be mad that Israel tried to give Palestine near expired COVID vaccines and then acted like they did something? Can we be mad?!