I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.
If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.
(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)
As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
Myself and others are reliant on a 2-second reblog to be able to support ourselves as artists, you and your 10 followers are where it starts.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: it's more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It's performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.
This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what's good and bad.
On Iran, Islam and the silence that reveals everything.
By: Frederick Alexander
Published: Jan 23, 2026
Dear Friend of the Oppressed,
You’ve spent two years telling us who deserves your solidarity. Now thousands of Iranians are dying in the streets, and you’ve gone quiet.
In recent weeks, the people of Iran have risen up against a fascist theocracy, demanding the same freedoms you enjoy and take for granted. When I say fascist, I don’t mean in the sense you apply it to people worrying about uncontrolled immigration. I mean actual fascism, where dissent is crushed through the slaughter of unarmed civilians, most of them under 30.
Thousands have poured into the streets to face down a regime that has strangled the people of Iran for 47 years – the same regime, incidentally, that armed and funded the “resistance” you spent the last two years championing.
Despite internet shutdowns, footage has managed to escape. Look around online and you’ll eventually see clips of young women burning hijabs and crowds chanting “death to the dictator”. The Revolutionary Guards have responded with bullets, using machine guns mounted on pickup trucks to mow people down. Reports suggest thousands dead, possibly as many as 20,000. Possibly more.
Where are you?
You belong to a noisy crowd that’s marched through city streets and boiled over with moral fury since October 2023. You’ve been unavoidable, shutting down campuses, blocking traffic, and lecturing the rest of us about “genocide”. For two years you’ve waved flags, chanted slogans, and wept publicly for children you never met in a war you never bothered to understand.
Then Iran happens, and you say nothing.
Teenage girls in Tehran are beaten and shot for wanting to choose their own clothes and live without male permission. Where are your protest marches through London or New York? Why no encampments or candlelit vigils?
Just silence.
Iran doesn’t fit. For two years and more, you’ve lived inside a simple narrative, one pushed relentlessly in every lecture room and student union – the one about oppressed versus oppressor. Brown people versus white colonial oppressors. You’ve been taught to treat Islam as an identity category rather than a belief system. In your mind, criticising clerical fascism in Tehran gets interpreted as attacking Muslims themselves – just another form of racism.
It’s a politically fashionable view of the world and socially rewarding. It’s also false.
Someone else pays the price.
Nika Shakarami was sixteen when she joined the protests in Tehran on September 20, 2022. Videos show her standing on an overturned bin, setting fire to her headscarf.
Hours later, eyewitnesses saw plainclothes security officers chase Nika through the streets. One witness filmed her ducking behind cars while riot police on motorcycles closed in. Another told CNN she saw officers bundle her into a car. “I wanted to save her, but I couldn’t”.
Nika’s phone went dead just before midnight. For nine days, her family searched police stations, jails, and hospitals.
When the IRGC document was leaked in April 2024, the truth of what had happened could finally be reconstructed.
She’d been forced into an unmarked freezer van with three security officers. On the way to prison, one of the officers molested her. Despite being handcuffed, she fought back. The men beat her with batons. When the team leader opened the rear door, she was dead. A senior officer instructed him to “dump her on the street”.
On September 30, her family was finally allowed to identify her body. The death certificate said “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object” – injuries the regime claimed were the result of her jumping from a building.
The leaked IRGC document names the men who killed her. It describes the sexual assault and admits “three batons and three Tasers were all used. It is not clear which one of the blows was the fatal one”. None of the men was punished.
You never said her name. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of her.
[ Nika Shakarami. ]
Nika is just one story among many. How many Nikas were assaulted and murdered in the latest uprisings by the “morality police”? We’ll never know.
Iran’s theocrats murder their own people, but they’re also anti-American and Islamic. Above all, they hate Israel.
So you stay quiet.
Iran’s struggle is an unspeakable tragedy for its young people. The brave souls bleeding out in Tehran are your age. They want what you were handed at birth – the freedom to choose their way of life and live without fear. The difference is they’re willing to die for it, while you won’t even risk social discomfort. You’re terrified of not fitting in, so you work harder to say the approved things and think the correct thoughts.
But they’re not really your thoughts, are they?
Nika Shakarami was sixteen when she burned her hijab and died for it. She’s one name among thousands you’ll never say. Not because you don’t know their struggle for freedom, but because acknowledging it would cost you something.
So the banner ad didn’t scale down for the mobile browser and it took me multiple minutes to realize that this stock photo of people in business suits was not, in fact, an illustration of what oathbreaker paladins in service to an evil power are supposed to look like
I wanted to point out that Nurse Hadley, the woman in this video, is a hospice nurse. This is what people say to and about patients who don't have long left to live. The fear of addiction and dependence on pain medication is so strong that people deny their literally dying family members proper pain management. You're never going to please the "but what about addiction" people, ignore them and take the meds you need to function.
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