i remember when Instagram mostly banned me from my account for an entire year after posting about police brutality and its' links to white supremacy and institutionalized violence -it was during the height of the BLM movement after George Floyd was murdered. i remember calling out ex-co-workers at the time and people on social media i was mutuals with at the time for saying 'but it's not all cops, some are good,' and my response to that, and will always be: policing systems do MORE harm than good in communities. cops get little to zero training and are allowed to bear arms and have a licences to maim, injure, and kill people (most of whom, are NOT threats). and it's beyond unacceptable. the amount of funding these fucking systems get too when it can be allocated to programs that ACTUALLY do good.
defund the police.
end the occupation and free palestine!
*also, a few people have noted this, but yes, I believe it appears that the cop spat on the memorial candles too. and the fact he will never be fired and told to give up his badge for doing such a heinous thing is just despicable* -and yes all cops are bad.
the phenomenon of zionist bloggers on here fitting the 2015 steven universe, passionate shipper, AO3 supernatural/dr who/our flag means death/hamilton etc cinnamon roll millennial cringe menace needs to be given a name and i think we should call this Smol Bean Zionism
"Today marks one year since the death of the People’s Bubbie Shatzi Weisberger. Before she passed, she said, “I’ll fight like hell for a free Palestine until the day I die. Then I’ll keep fighting. Your queer ancestor is with you.”
If you’ve been rising up in solidarity with Palestine these past two months, your queer ancestor is indeed with you, along with countless other antizionist Jewish ancestors. For many, family and community rifts may be especially painful right now. No matter what, you are not alone. Remember that you have a long lineage of elders and ancestors at your back.
Last night, Israel resumed its brutal bombing of Gaza and has already killed dozens of people. Shatzi would encourage all of us to do everything we can right now for a permanent, lasting ceasefire. To mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Shatzi died on World AIDS Day, which was b’sheret ("destined”) because in addition to being a lifelong organizer, she was a nurse for 47 years who cared for people living and dying with AIDS.
From ACT UP’s organizing to end AIDS to the movement for Palestinian freedom, we honor the ancestors and movements who made us possible."
We will be forever grateful to the ancestors who paved the path before us. May their memories fuel us to work towards freedom for all people — no exceptions."
trying to explain to dumbass tumblr users that saying they benefit from systemic oppression on a certain axis is not the same as invalidating every struggle theyve ever had in their entire life
Anyone else remember when we were like, decades ahead of this kind of thinking, and advocating for co-ed sports, because we all understood that two people undergoing the same training at the same intensity for the same amount of time would achieve roughly the same result regardless of agab?
There are several Telegram channels like this, each with tens of thousands of Israeli followers watching snuff films of Palestinians getting killed and reacting with joy and satisfaction
so turns out some of this horrific work is actually state funded and operated?!
***
The IDF Operations Directorate's Influencing Department, which is responsible for psychological warfare operations against the enemy and foreign audiences, operates a Telegram channel called 72 Virgins – Uncensored, which targets Israeli audiences and shows the bodies of Hamas terrorists with the promise of "shattering the terrorists' fantasy."
what stage of fascism is "state provided snuff films"?
German sports brand says decision was taken for business reasons and not related to consumer backlash
"The company, whose sales of €8.4bn in 2022 were almost double the level in 2018 when the calls for boycotts began, declined to comment"
it's important to mention that the boycott has been ongoing since 2018, and it has been working greatly and that is the last step. sure it was a business and financial decision, wonder how did that come to be though !
Together, we have caused PUMA to lose millions in important sports contracts, exposed PUMA’s lies and spread our call for justice with milli
check the progress made by the BDS movement through the years "Together, we have caused PUMA to lose millions in important sports contracts, exposed PUMA’s lies and spread our call for justice with millions worldwide. We won’t stop until PUMA finally ends its complicity in Israeli apartheid." and they fucking did that!
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding part of the BDS movement, welcomes the news tha
At the time of this post on 12 December 2023, the BDS movement is celebrating Puma's withdrawal from IFA sponsorship, but have not yet called to end the consumer boycott. Keep an eye out on their website over the next week to see whether continued boycotting is requested to ensure Puma's complete withdrawal from illegal settlements.
I was reading one of the Substacks I subscribe to, talking about how they promote their publication and their various sources of traffic, when I came across this paragraph:
Now I happen to also run a fairly popular Substack (about gay vampires). One whose readers are almost entirely Tumblr users. And Tumblr clicks have just never shown up in my stats, I’m used to it. Naturally I had to comment:
It’s not just Substack’s tracking that doesn’t work on here. NO tracking works on here. Tumblr is just one of the last platforms left that completely obscures its users’ data!
That’s why there’s this persistent myth that you can’t advertise on Tumblr. It's not that you can't sell things here, it's that you can't use the invasive methods that are standard everywhere else.
This post is taking off a little bit and I’m getting confused tags from a lot of people about whether this is a good thing. I thought it was clear enough that I didn’t need to spell it out but YES this is a VERY GOOD thing for you and your privacy!!
It’s ALSO why Tumblr is trying to fund itself through ad free subscriptions and blazes, because this is a massive turnoff to advertisers.
im genuinely so sick of the way zionists just... cheapen antizionism. like treating protests as some zoomer trend, as something used for social media SJW clout or whatever, that we're all overzealous teenagers hyping up hamas to be edgy. i think for sure it portrays the very dismissive way they themselves view palestinian genocide more than anything else but fuck, man. it's so grim to treat the human reaction to the crisis in palestine so dismissively and disdainfully, just a very casually cruel way to view a people's suffering as something not even serious or genuine to engage with
Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?
To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:
SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!
Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it):
THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles!
✨Cons: None really <3
Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup
Twine:
Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want)
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch)
✨Cons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain.
Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity
Bitsy:
Little topdown games!
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small!
✨Cons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing!
Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty
RPGMaker:
To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!!
NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post.
✨Pros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here!
✨Cons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale!
Some games to look at: Ib, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)
engine.lol:
collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden!
NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?
✨more advice under the cut. this is Long ok✨
ENGINES I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY SEEM HARD BUT ALSO GIVE IT A TRY I GUESS!!!! :
Unity and Unreal: I don't know anything about those! That looks hard to learn! But indie devs use them! It seems expensive! Follow your dreams though! Don't ask me how!
GameMaker: Wuh I just don't know anything about it either! I just know it's now free if your game is non-commercial (aka, you're not selling it), and Undertale was made on it! It seems good! You probably need some coding experience though!!!
Godot: Man I know even less about this one. Heard good things though!
BUNCHA RANDOM ADVICE!!!!
-Make something small first! Try making simple: a character is in a room, and exits the room. The character can look around, decide to take an item with them, can leave, and maybe the door is locked and you have to find the key. Figuring out how to code something like that, whether it is as a fully text-based game or as an RPGMaker map, should be a good start to figure out how your software of choice works!
-After that, if you have an idea, try first to make the simplest version of that idea. For my timeloop RPG, my simplest version was two rooms: first room you can walk in, second room with the King, where a cutscene automatically plays and the battle starts, you immediately die, and loop back to the first room, with the text from this point on reflecting this change. I think I also added a loop counter. This helped me figure out the most important thing: Can This Game Be Made? After that, the rest is just fun stuff.
So if you want to make a dating sim, try and figure out how to add choices, and how to have affection points go up and down depending on your choices! If you want to make a platformer, figure out how to make your character move and jump and how to create a simple level! If you just want to make a kinetic visual novel with no choices, figure out how to add text, and how to add portraits! You'll be surprised at how powerful you'll feel after having figured even those simple things out.
-If you have a programming problem or just get confused, never underestimate the power of asking Google! You most likely won't be the only person asking this question, and you will learn some useful tips! If you are powerful enough, you can even… Ask people??? On forums??? Not me though.
-Yeah I know you probably want to make Your Big Idea RIGHT NOW but please. Make a smaller prototype first. You need to get that experience. Trust me.
-If you are not a womanthing of many skills like me, you might realize you need help. Maybe you need an artist, or a programmer. So! Game jams on itch.io are a great way to get to work and meet other game devs that have different strengths! Or ask around! Maybe your artist friend secretly always wanted to draw for a game. Ask! Collaborate! Have fun!!!
I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye
Seriously cannot recommend GBStudio enough for beginners, it makes making a gb/gbc game pretty simple, it's also FOSS (free, open source software) and the devs in my experience are very responsive as is the community
A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system.
Worth noting that ren'py and gb studio will happily let you add whatever ridiculous code you want on top of their frameworks. GB Studio will straight up dump the entire engine as a CMake project if you want to work in assembler or C, so if you don't like the way something works you can change it.
A while ago, I made a doc filled with pretty much evwry cheap and free resource I could find for game dev, and Im still working on it. Highly reccommend checking it out.
i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken
the underwhelming dense pang of sadness mixed with the loss of personal identity and opportunity that goes hand-in-hand when you're forced to live with your parents as someone well into their adult years lol
sorry this was supposed to say overwhelming. it gets to be too much. trying to fit your adult interests in the confined spaces of your childhood room; the emotions of your younger self piled within the crevices of this one room that you're able to express yourself in is... overwhelming and choking
not to mention the mixture of emotions, right? grateful you're not homeless. grateful your parent extends a helping hand. grateful they understand why you're not on your own. yet you're still grieving what could be. grieving the creativity you have to shelter because it's not your space to create. the experiences you must only daydream, the ones you're missing out on, because you can't bring people over. the rules you must follow, even as a grown adult with your own autonomy, because there are even older adults who want things to be in place; inherently feeling like an infant no matter what you do, no matter how much older you get. etc, etc, etc, and so on.
i also need liberal zionists to stop being an acceptable part of the tumblr ecosystem. i need people to treat them like the terfs and nazis on this site. let them sit in their hateful little corner and stop spreading their posts around
I've come back to my blog temporarily to articulate some opinions I have actually on this subject. Cuz it's something that has really been happening a lot.
There's a group of people on this website who continously spread zionist propaganda as supposedly criticism of 'pro-Palestine white liberals' but the only people ever present in the screenshots they include are Palestinians and other Arabs. They also never ever ever engage with Palestinian advocacy, or Palestinians at all (hint hint they have us all blocked, so we blocked them back). So for the logical observer:
1) either they're lying and claiming they're attacking white liberals when they're only ever attacking Palestinians and Arabs, because they're racist and want to deligitimize our pov, which is the center of this issue.
2) or there are white liberals they want to criticize but they only feel comfortable attacking Palestinians and Arabs, because they're racist.
But both of these answers are a detraction from the reality of these people's actions. It doesn't matter, because their criticisms are not even founded in reality. They literally take posts exclusively critical of zionism or the occupation, then somehow make it a bad faith interpretation about the destruction of Jewish people. And then suddenly, and only if you have bought into the racist propaganda, you are facing antisemites.
I'm gonna name names but only so some of y'all can go take a look at this shit yourselves. Spacelazarwolf / anshelsgendercrisis, tributary, athingofvikings, the-library-alcove, 2peachy, heroisrael, etc... after everytime one of these makes a post like this the Palestinians or the Arabs in the post get targetted with death threats, rape threats, and other forms of harassment very pointedly. Their actions are not without direct consequential harm to Palestinian and Arab bloggers. I actually forgot to mention that they don't limit this treatment to us, they treat Jewish anti-zionists with that same cudgel, and they get attacked too. In that vein, I ask of you not to interact with them, not to send them a message, just block and let the people around you know to block and avoid. Treat these people like you treat T*RFs.
It's very ironic that those Western zionists that call themselves 'non-zionists', who consistently present criticisms of 'white liberals' in their own words, will follow and reblog from Israeli zionists like 2peachy, heroisrael, mermer404, etc... whose arguments amount to justification for segregation through arguments of 'protection of innocent civilians', and at times justification for genocide. That's when they're not doing outright genocide denial of course.
This should be your biggest and most vivid indicator that these people are not leftists. They are fascists who speak the language of social justice. White segregationists in the South also wanted to protect themselves from Black people, who they called thugs and criminals. Nazi Germans also wanted to protect themselves from Jewish and Polish people, who they called rats. Americans wanted to protect themselves from the First Nations, who they called savages. It's only fair that you see the fascism when Israelis say they want protection from Palestinians, who they call terrorists.
Their views are not harmless, their actions are not harmless, their rhetoric is not harmless. Block them and warn your mutuals when you see them reblogging from them.
via @ palestinianfeministcollective’s instagram today:
During the past two months, Palestinians have endured another catastrophic genocide. Over 21,000 Palestinians were martyred. Thousands more who have sustained life-threatening injuries are barely surviving without access to emergency medical care. 1.9 million people have been displaced from their homes and are now facing the imminent threat of forcible expulsion to Egypt. Palestinians are systematically being kidnapped and tortured en masse and an end to the bombardment is nowhere in sight.
Palestinians across the world have also been subjects of racist and dehumanizing media campaigns created to manufacture consent for this genocide and discredit our movement for liberation.
Among the many racist, colonial, and sexist tropes animating Zionist propaganda is the age-old Orientalist characterization of Palestinian men as bloodthirsty terrorists, rapists, savages, and loveless monsters who use their children as human shields and oppress Palestinian women.
As feminists, we know that Orientalist tropes about [our] men are manufactured for colonial and imperial aims and are normalized as truth in racist imaginations. Yet even among those who empathize with the Palestinian struggle come endless commemorations of Palestinian women and children absent recognition of the suffering and death of Palestinian men. This dangerously conditions the public to believe that Palestinian men are not worthy of grief or even love.
It is not our interest to counter the racist narratives made about Palestinian men and boys. That would equate to trying to prove our humanity to those actively erasing us. But as Palestinian feminists, we feel compelled to affirm that Palestinian men and boys are our fathers, brothers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, cousins, and partners - they are our family, and we love them.
Palestinian men are our friends, our comrades in struggle, our teachers and protectors, our spiritual guides and healers - and we love them. They are suffering the injury of this ongoing Nakba, physically, spiritually, and emotionally alongside us - and we love them. They are navigating grief, trauma, and pain and we love them. They are practicing defiance, resistance, and steadfastness - and we love them. They are freedom fighters - and we love them. They are full beings with contradictions - and we love them.
Palestinian men are our kin. We stand with them against all those justifing and enacting violence upon their bodies, souls, and dignity. We refuse to allow them to be rendered disposable to the affective world where Palestinian children and women are given some - even if minimal -recognition. As feminists, we want the world to know that we love our Palestinian men, have never stopped loving them, and will never stop loving them.
Our feminist vision advocates for breaking intimate and state cycles of violence by centering and transforming home, family, and community spaces into sites of care and healing. We acknowledge the immeasurable sacrifices and hardships Palestinian men experience caused by Zionism and the relentless hope and courage they continue to foster within US. We uphold radical love as an act of liberation that grounds our collective survival and resistance.
Almadhoun was to fly to Ireland for his art, but has been stuck at Gaza’s Rafah border.
please please read.
i've been in touch with Mohammed off and on when he's able to communicate. i was looking forward to meeting him when we were set to live together in residency starting Oct 7th. the circumstances of his absence are devastating. stuck at Rafah, deprived of his family, often without water or food, plus his studio and decades of work were destroyed in Israel's bombings. please read his account here, which also includes some of his paintings-- in his words, he became an artist to share the Palestinian experience with the world.
fight for a ceasefire now. and remember ceasefire is not enough.
