zacfoss1001

[zacfoss1001]

hey man i think the "free palestine" narrative is as compelling as anybody. you have an absolute hero/victim who can do no wrong and is the champion of all oppressed people everywhere. it's a really moving story; the issue is that none of it is true.

[zacfoss1001]

Umm, well. Thats not frightening. No siree, nein mei rav

It's difficult to overstate how serious I'm being when I say that there is a terrorist cell operating out of Columbia University and no one is doing anything about it. I am not being hysterical. I am not exaggerating. There is a terrorist cell operating out of Columbia University. This is a matter of totally open record and no one is doing anything serious to deal with it.

-The Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was shut down after an investigation into their funding under the Biden administration found that they were being partially funded by Hamas.

-This resulted in no arrests or expulsions, and the organization was allowed to rebrand as CUAD under the same leadership.

-Student organizers from the Columbia branches of SJP, CUAD, JVP, WoL, and other organizations are currently being sued in federal court for allegedly knowing about the Oct 7th terror attacks in advance.

-Court documents show that these student leaders had produced propaganda supporting the Oct 7th attacks before they had occurred, and were using Hamas's code name for the attacks before it was made public.

-THREE separate hostages have now gone on legal record stating that Columbia students were extensively coordinating with at least one member of Hamas who kept them captive, and that this member of Hamas told them that their coordination with Columbia University student leaders (and other student leaders) is/was extensive.

-The Columbia student defendants in this lawsuit have not denied that they coordinated with members of Hamas, only claiming that they were "unaware" he was a member of Hamas. This is despite the fact that the Hamas member who kept the hostages captive, Abdallah Aljamal, was completely open about his affiliation on social media.

This does not even scratch the surface of the raging antisemitism, overt Hamas support, and felony level hate crimes that Columbia University students have engaged in en mass over the past year and a half. It's also not even scratching the surface of the broader connections many of the parent organizations of Columbia "activist" branches have to terrorist organizations (nearly all of them have been caught funneling money into terrorist organizations.) This is just focusing on the direct involvement of Columbia student leaders specifically, with Hamas and the Oct 7th attacks.

Genuinely, what is going on right now? All of this is public information and yet it isn't being reported on at all? A lot of these students should be in federal prison, and yet they're not even being suspended, and the media consistently presents them as peaceful protesters who are being unfairly called antisemitic.

I don't know what to do anymore, I really don't. Even the broader Jewish community doesn't seem to be aware of what's going on here and just how literally Columbia University students are operating an actual terrorist cell. But it's happening whether people talk about it or not! I can't take this anymore.

[zacfoss1001]

[zacfoss1001]

Hear hear

If it was really "anti-Zionism and not antisemitism" then you would be working your tuchus off to make the diaspora safe for all Jews, especially Israeli ex-pats. You would be bending over backwards to demonstrate (against the great weight of historical evidence) that the diaspora is safe, that there is no need for Jewish sovereignty, that we can totally trust our neighbors to have learned - or at a minimum, that the majority will step in to stop any antisemitic violence before it gained traction.

Instead, you repeat this antisemitic Soviet propagandist slogan designed from the start to isolate, marginalize, and ultimately murder Jews, because that is your goal. If it's actually not your goal and you are offended that I would suggest it is, then you need to sit down, learn some Jewish history, and shut the fuck up until you understand why and how you got sucked into a hate movement that supports another Holocaust.

[zacfoss1001]

Shavuot is about the Jewish people signing the Terms & Conditions before reading them.

Every generation, however, gets patch updates and both the user manuals and technical documentation are incredibly detailed.

And excellent user support is available from specialists who have made it their life's work to study the documentation, Rabbis.

A good Rabbi will never just tell the user to RTFM.

[zacfoss1001]

Insane horsemanship skills here. Legendary.

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

[zacfoss1001]

By all that is holy, this it the best, most human, most sympathetic take I have seen in the last 600 days.

If your real goal is the preservation of human life, and human dignity, we must consider crying for more death, more expulsions, more revenge killings, will not increase human flourishing.

I’m not versed in politics, in fact quite the opposite. I’m just someone trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world, and especially what’s happening in Palestine and Israel right now. But the more I follow the discourse, especially online, the more I feel something’s off. There seems to be a deep fracture within the pro-Palestinian movement itself.

On one side, there’s a lot of leftist (often academic rhetoric) about settler colonialism, class struggle, the state as an instrument of oppression, and the need for global revolution. In these spaces, Palestine often isn’t discussed as a real place with diverse people, it becomes more like a symbolic battlefield for ideological purity. Every analysis feels like it’s filtered through the lens of some larger theory.

On the other side, there’s a more populist wave of support driven by the horrific images and stories coming out of Gaza. These people are reacting from a place of raw emotion. But sometimes I get the feeling they’re unaware, or maybe even uninterested, in the larger historical context - or in what’s happening across the fence in Israel. In some of these conversations, Israeli civilians are simply erased, or cast as indistinguishable from their government.

And the result? The actual conflict, the impossible, human mess at the heart of it, is getting lost. And worse, the actual people caught in the middle, Palestinians and Israelis alike, are being reduced to ideological tools or emotional triggers. Their suffering gets flattened into either theory or outrage, depending on the speaker.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just how large movements operate. But it feels like both sides are so locked into their narratives that there’s no room left for ambiguity, or complexity, or empathy on either side of the fence. No space to ask: What happens next? What kind of future do the people living there actually want? What does peace even mean now?

Supporting human rights is the baseline of moral decency. But I also think we need to ask: are we supporting a people, or are we using them to support an idea?

[zacfoss1001]

atp the only way we’re going to get out of this ai shit while people’s brains are still semi intact is to start bribing influencers and tiktokers into saying chatgpt is cringe and it emits a frequency that blocks your divine energy which can only be channeled back by reading a book and talking to your friends

[zacfoss1001]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[zacfoss1001]

Celebrate Jewish Heritage Month with Queer Jewish Reads!

Shalom Aleichem! May is Jewish Heritage Month, and to celebrate, we asked our contributors for their recommendations of queer books with Jewish characters or/and written by Jewish authors. I (Nina Waters), the owner of Duck Prints Press, am Jewish, so it’s a pleasure to finally be celebrating my own heritage with a themed list. The contributors to the list are: Tris Lawrence, Shea Sullivan, Nina Waters, Adrian Harley, Meera S., Linnea Peterson, and hullosweetpea.

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman

Make Room for Love by Darcy Liao

Lady Eve’s Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker

DeadEndia by Hamish Steele

Add Magic to Taste Anthology, edited by Nina Waters

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon

Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert

Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi

The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli

Season of Love by Helena Greer

For Never & Always by Helena Greer

Flying Without a Net by E.M. Ben Shaul

Body, Remember: A Memoir by Kenny Fries

Yudah Cohen Short Story Series by Rebecca Fraimow

“Further Arguments In Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman”

“Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected”

“Gitl Schneiderman Learns to Live With Her In-Laws”

What awesome queer Jewish books did we miss? Let us know!

Find these books on our Goodreads bookshelves, and/or visit the recommendation list in our affiliate shop on Bookshop.org and buy them for yourself!

Join our Book Lover’s Discord server to chat with us about books, fandom and more!

[zacfoss1001]

Grit and bloom

[zacfoss1001]

Curiosity is the First Virtue!

Not to sound like a fuckin hippie but please for the love of god start noticing and appreciating the natural world around you. You don’t have to go hike the entire Appalachian trail or anything and I get that not everyone has access to the outdoors for various reasons, but just fucking … look around you when you’re outside. Notice the sky and the sun and the birds and creatures. Start caring about them. I’m begging you.

[zacfoss1001]

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

[zacfoss1001]

Reblagging as usual

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

[zacfoss1001]

My brain supplied me with the most Addams Family coded phrases this morning:

"I hope I'm not just a friend and co-worker to you, but also a creeping sense of dread"

"Our vows say 'until death do us part,' and mi amor — you just parted"

"I thought you said this was 'cutting edge technology,' so why are there all these safety features?"

Why my mind decided to fully go down the campy goth garden path in my dreams is a mystery, but honestly I'm here for it

[zacfoss1001]

Jesus christ, I wish to just one day be this pinnacle of wit, horniness, and sacrilege.

[zacfoss1001]

Words to live by