un changement d'angle suffit

xe/xer * ze/zir / tme punjabi nb / >20 / i hate lovecraft

[fatehbaz]

Edit: I removed the screenshot so as not to share dm stuff, but I got a message from someone who couldn't send an ask, inquiring: "i was wondering what book it was that you mentioned about the philippines? i'd be interested in reading it"

Sorry to post; figured it would be a subject worth sharing with interested others. Good news: It's an article, so it's relatively easier to access and read.

Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. Hosted and published by Antipode Online. 4 January 2024.

Basically:

Explores connections between plantations in US-occupied Philippines and the policing institutions and technologies of Chicago. Martinez begins with racism and white anxiety in Chicago in the 1870s. Coinciding with Black movement from the South during Reconstruction and the Great Migration, Chicago was, in Martinez's telling, a center of white anxiety and apprehension. Chicago public, newspapers, and institutions wanted to obsessively record information about Black people and white labor dissidents, including details on their motivations and internal/inner life. Between 1880-ish and 1910-ish Chicago then became a center of surveillance, records-keeping, classification systems, and new innovations in monitoring dissent and collecting information. Within a year after the labor rebellions, the Adjutant General of the US Army who led Chicago's militarized crackdown on the 1877 Great Railroad Strike immediately moved to DC and proposed establishing "the Military Information Division" (MID); eventually founded in 1885, MID started collecting hundreds of thousands of Bertillon-system intelligence cards on dissidents and "criminals." Meanwhile, National Association of Chiefs of Police headquartered their central bureau of identification (NBCI) in Chicago in 1896. At play here is not just the collection of information, but the classification systems organizing that information. The MID and related agencies would then go on to collect mass amounts of information on domestic residents across the US. In Martinez's telling, these policing beliefs and practices - including intelligence cards, "management sciences," and policing unit organization - were then "exported" by MID to the Philippines and used to monitor labor and anticolonial dissent. Another Chicago guy developed "personality typing" and psychological examinations to classify criminality, and then trained Philippines police forces to collect as much information as possible about colonial subjects.

The information-gathering in the Philippines constituted what other scholars like Alfred McCoy have called one of the United States' first "information revolutions"; McCoy described these technologies and practices as "capillaries of empire." Martinez suggests that it's important to trace the lineage of these racialized anxieties and practices from Chicago to the Philippines, because "such feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant." And "[u]ltimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures [...] and feelings emanating from Chicago [...] that extended from the image of the American South."

Side-note:

The Bertillon system was standardized at about this same time, 1879-ish, and in similar social and racial contexts, becoming popular in other Midwest/Great Lakes cities, especially to track Black people (though it was also rapidly and widely adopted famously as an essential approach across Europe). The system used body measurements to identify and classify people, especially "criminals," significantly involving photography, such that Bertillon is also sometimes credited as the originator of "the mugshot."

I'd add that the aforementioned police chiefs National Bureau of Criminal Identification (NBCI) stayed in Chicago from 1896 until 1902, when the killing of President McKinley frightened officials with potential of wider popular communist/labor movements; at that point, it was moved to DC, as William Pinkerton (co-director of the Pinkerton agency) donated the agency's photograph collection to build the new bureau, and NBCI strengthened itself by collecting Bertillon-style fingerprints and became the precursor to the FBI, founded 1908. (After 1895-ish especially, European authorities were transcending their petty rivalries to attempt forming international police agencies and share documents, tracking each others' domestic radicals/dissidents.)

You could compare the colonial use of Bertillon-style intelligence card systems in Chicago and US-occupied Philippines to the rise of fingerprinting as a weapon of Britain.

Edward Henry was the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, appointed 1891, basically the top cop in British India. He exchanged letters with notorious eugenicist Francis Galton, wherein they specifically talked about the importance of developing a classification system for fingerprints that could be used alongside the Bertillon system of anthropometric identification. (Another British imperial administrator in India, Sir William Herschel, had previously been the first to pioneer fingerprinting by taking hand-prints.) By 1897, police forces in India had been adopting the so-called Henry Classification System, and the Governor-General of India personally decreed that fingerprinting be adopted across India. By 1900, Henry was sent to South Africa to train police in classification systems. By 1903, Henry was back in Britain and became head of the Metropolitan Police of London, now the top cop in Britain. (Compare dates with US developments: British police in India adopt fingerprint identification system the same year that Chicago police found their proto-FBI central identification bureau. Less than a year after the US head-of-state gets killed, Britain super-charges the London police.)

So, the guy who pioneered fingerprinting classification for use in maintaining order and imperial power in India and other colonies was eventually brought in to deploy those tactics on Britons in the metropole. The kind of colony-to-metropole violence thing described by many theorists. Britain also developed traditions of police photography in context of rebellions in Jamaica and India to collect personally identifiable information and track dissent. The Ottoman Empire cultivated a system of passports and related laws to monitor and direct movement; France did something similar in colonial Algeria.

And Great Lakes cities, after the Great Migration, were notorious for this kind of police violence. Consider how the Bertillon system was used early-on by Minneapolis police to track and target Black "alley workers" (try keyword-searching "Minneapolis Bertillon alley workers"). Or how Chicago was a focal point of antiblack violence in the Red Summer of 1919. Or how Milwaukee has some the most distinct Black-white segregation of any large urban area in the US. Or how, after Elliot Ness lionized law enforcement officials in Chicago during the Al Capone case, he then led policing operations in Cleveland culminating in the mass eviction and the burning of Kingsbury Run shantytown. (Chicago is like a funnel, a node, a hub. Especially after the 1860s: Center of railroad networks. Center of telegraph networks. Destination for Texas/Kansas cattle shipped to Chicago meatpacking houses. Destination for Corn Belt prairie agricultural products. Hence the 1893 Columbian fair and Chicago's turn of the century image as a modernist metropolis. So they had to keep the laborers in line.)

Anyway, the other story that I mentioned regarding Philippines was from:

Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017.

For context, I'd note that this takes place in the midst of the US's "conquest of the mosquito" in its militarized occupation of Panama, where the canal was completed in 1914.

In Mitman's story, Richard P. Strong was appointed as director of the brand-new Department of Tropical Medicine at Harvard in 1913. Shortly thereafter in 1914, as he toured plantations in Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, etc., Strong simultaneously took a job as director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of the United Fruit Company (infamous for its brutal labor conditions in plantations, its land-grabbing in Central America, and its relationship to US corporate power). Harvard hired Strong partially on the recommendation of General William Cameron Forbes, who was the military governor of US-occupied Philippines from 1909 to 1913. When Harvard hired Strong, he had been living in the Philippines, where he was the personal physician to Governor Forbes, and was also the director of the Philippine Bureau of Science's Biological Laboratory, where he had experimented on Filipino prisoners without their knowledge; Strong fatally infected these unknowing test-subjects with bubonic plague. Then, Governor Forbes, after leading the US occupation of the Philippines, himself became an overseer to Harvard AND a director of United Fruit Company (also Forbes was a banker and the son of the president of Bell Telephone Company). Meanwhile, Strong also became a shareholder in British rubber plantations; Strong approached Harvey Firestone to help encourage the massive rubber company to negotiate a deal to expand plantations in West Africa, where Firestone got a 99-year-long concession to lease a million acres of land in Liberia. So there's an intimate relationship between military, plantations, colonization, academic funding models, corporate profiteering, land dispossession, etc.

---

So, in each case, the plantation expands in time and space. There is imperial anxiety about the threat of potential subversion from recalcitrant laborers. Imperial authorities cooperate and learn from each other. The rubber plantation owner is friends with the military guy, who's friends with the laboratory technician, who's friends with the railroad developer, who's friends with the cop, who's friends with banana plantation owner. There are connections between the exercise of power in the Philippines and Panama and West Africa and Bengal and Chicago. Connections both material and imaginative.

Disturbing stuff.

[shoggothgf]

feeling fucked forever again but oh well........ i need to get my head screwed on straight again even though one million years of winter is driving me absolutely nuts and the fact that my workplace is usually 50 degrees indoors despite the fact that we legally shouldnt be open below 60...well whatever. i did calibrate the next few months to be relatively easy on me and i'm extremely lucky to have that option at all but it's such a fucking slog to do the bare minimum to get through my day

[flower-psychedelic]

A Cruel God Reigns by Moto Hagio

[fatehbaz]

Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions around the country - in addition to those in the South - became newly dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of conditions under which “criminals” and criminality can be continually produced (“socially constructed”). Norton offers an interesting case study of a rural prison archipelago that developed in upstate New York based on arguments by local officials that buildings constructed for the 1980 Winter Olympics would serve the prison industry in the future. New York State built thirty-nine new state prisons between 1982 and 2000, all of them in rural counties. But it was the forty-fifth state senate district in the far northern region of the state that built more than any other district, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were fourteen prisons located in the district, more than twice any other. Norton shows that a short-term opportunistic argument to win the Olympic bid depended on a vision of a future archipelago of prisons and, indeed, a steady supply of prisoners to fill them. […]

—

[A]t the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America - specifically in poor, rural, southern towns - for the past fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled […].

Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. […] Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of four such archipelagoes […] [including] in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons) […].

Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. […] Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteen-prison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying “myth” that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. […]

—

It is not only prisoners’ labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the “purchase” of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom. 

—

All text above by: Karen M. Morin. “Cattle Towns, Prison Towns: Historical Geographies of Rural Carceral Archipelagoes". Historical Geography, Volume 47, Number 1, pages 141-165. Published 2019. At: doi dot org slash 10.1354/hgo.2019.0004 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[tajrishgp]

South Gaza: Tents, Food & Water

**With Famine on the rise, we will significantly lower tent purchases and focus on food (rice and bread) and water over the next couple of w

[fatehbaz]

Traditional scholarship in the history of science associates the quantifiable, universal human body with the European Enlightenment or ‘new science’. This measurable, universal body, it is argued, came to define modern medicine. [...] But this widely accepted history of the universalisation and systemisation of human corporeality [...] [also involves] an earlier global history of enslaving and measuring bodies in the Indies, born of the Iberian slave trade between Africa and colonial Iberian America. It was in the violent and profitable world of this slave trade that [some particular] universal [...] calculations of health risks, disease and bodily characteristics [...] emerged. [...] [T]he scale of data production about bodies in the early modern world of Iberian slave trading [was immense] [...].

The key concept in this early modern quantification of the body was the pieza de Indias (Spanish) or peça da India (Portuguese). [...]

The appearance of this new measure and epistemology was intimately linked to the unprecedented rise in the size and complexity of the transatlantic commerce in human bodies during the first decades of the 17th century. The new [...] measure of man was the result of the slave trade’s need to quantify the risks of investing in human corporeality and its modern afflictions. By the late 16th century, Iberian slave traders, governments, corporations and financiers from around Europe (particularly from Genoa, Florence and the Netherlands) were already thinking of the transportation of slave bodies as units of risk.

---

The original licences for slaves transacted in Iberia were contractual concepts that did not refer to bodily characteristics [...] [and] were of limited help [...] for calculating the productivity [of a slave's body] [...]. Consequently, slave traders and slave-trading organisations, including the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Seville, developed methodologies that allowed them to translate slave bodies into numbers and calculate the inherent value [...] as it related to an increasingly normalised, constant unit called the pieza. The concept of the pieza (the piece) allowed for the creation of contracts where investors, providers and the state could prospectively calculate tariff, gains and risk using quantifiable notions of bodies [...].

In addition to peça, Portuguese slave traders [in West Africa] used several other terms to refer to slaves who were not adult [...], reflecting an increasingly rich taxonomy [...]. Muleque or muleca [...]. Slave traders began using these terms to refer to young bodies that they discounted at rates [...]. Calculating the value of cañengues, muleques and mulecas by converting them into standard adult [...] piezas was a common practice [...]. Portuguese officials in Sao Paulo da Assumpcao de Loanda deployed the concept when they tallied ‘the dispatch’, or fees due to the Portuguese crown, for the embarkment of African slaves bound for the Americas. Such methods to appraise slave bodies became normative in Spanish America for determining the tariffs that traders had to pay [...]

[C]rown officials were counting the ‘pieces of slaves’ (piezas de esclavos) disembarking in Santo Domingo and selling them to miners [...] [and] hacienda owners [...] to work in the mines and estates of the island. [...] [A] concept of an ideal body for transportation and labour [...] had emerged across the Atlantic, and during the first decades of the 17th century it was disseminated across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, being widely used in Dutch trading records. [...] [S]lave traders and government officials used the term pieza to talk about other captive bodies from the Indies, most notably native or 'Indian' bodies in the Caribbean.

---

The concept of the piece of the Indies appears in full form in the 1660s as part of negotiations of the terms of the asiento de negros or slave monopoly between the Spanish crown and the Genoese financiers Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelín. The contract with the Grillos established that they would ‘bring 24,500 blacks, piezas de Indias, over the course of seven years and starting in 1662’. The monopoly established as one of its conditions that ‘the said quantity of blacks should be piezas de Indias, each one seven cuartas of height and up’. [...]

Slave traders used height as a proxy for life histories of health and nutrition and as a predictor of the slave’s potential productivity [...] [and] created a complex system around the marker of height [...].

[H]aving grey hair, for instance, translated into a reduction in value of one cuarta or one-seventh of the standard pieza. The conditions of 'cloud in one eye [cataracts]' signified a reduction of two cuartas; scurvy, two cuartas; phlegm, one and one-half cuartas; a 'benign hernia', one cuarta [...]. Being older than 35 years merited a one-cuarta deduction [...]. The presence of lobanillos (small tumours) was worth one and one-half cuartas’ reduction; small fingers, one-half cuarta; incapacitating scars (burns), one and one-half cuarta; [...] localised ulcers, one-sixth of a cuarta; generalised ulcers, one cuarta; [...] short-sightednesss, two cuartas; [...] missing molars, one cuarta [...].

---

The contractual articulation of the concept [...] formalised slave-based knowledge production about human bodies. The contract assembled a vast storehouse of knowledge, much of it held in the House of Trade in Seville, obtained from thousands of records of bodily characteristics and diseases for hundreds of thousands of bodies [...].

The Grillos’ contract set a precedent for the 1679 contract between Spanish and Portuguese merchants and the Dutch West India Company. The 1696 asiento between Spanish crown and [financier F.M.] and [financier N.P.], for example, agreed they would transport 10,000 tonnes of freight including 30,000 piezas de Indias of the ‘regular measure of seven cuartas’. Similarly, a 1709 contract between the French Compagnie de Guinée and Dutch slave traders, settled in Amsterdam, specified that the French would pay 110 pièces de huit (pieces of eight) ‘for each black piece of Indies’ delivered in the Caribbean.

As the ‘new science’ of the European Enlightenment dawned in Europe, the piece of the Indies was well established [...].

---

All text above by: Pablo F. Gomez. "Pieza de Indias: Slave Trade and the Quantification of Human Bodies". A chapter in New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities (edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel), pp. 47-50. Published 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[o-fantasma]

a norm is any practice or discursive term by which a community - whether united by language, culture, religion, a hobby, a profession, etc - establish shared terms of practice or communication. for example, it is a norm of professional wine makers and hobbyist wine tasters to assess a wine based on its scent. this is not a norm among everybody using wine one might assess wine by its utility for eg, just getting drunk, or christian communion.

‘the normal’ or ‘normativity’ is an assemblage of norms that (attemptedly) universalises itself as the given standard for a mass society. eg, it is normal in britain to work for a living. it is normal to get married. ‘the normal’ also includes self referential standards eg, universalised standards for clothes sizing, which proliferate in western capitalist societies in the early 20th century (iirc) and the rest of the world downstream from structural factors. these structural factors are integral to establishing ‘the normal.’

as the example of clothes sizes begins to gesture at, ‘the normal’ is not undifferentiated. rather it represents a cluster of organising norms that as much define relationships between social groups as determine the ideal state. eg, what is ‘normal’ for men and what is ‘normal’ for women is different even as the organisation of norms prejudices standards for men as the ideal social standard.

furthermore, this organisation of ‘the normal’ has an influence on the norms of even dissenting groups within society. the standards of what is ‘normal’ for women shape what becomes the norm for feminist dissent against patriarchal standards; in fact, feminist discourse might even be defined by disagreement over exactly how one calibrates these relationships. eg, feminists will argue about whether certain fashion choices are ‘empowering’ or ‘demeaning’ according to how they relate to this suture of the idealised-normal to its particular norms. these terms (and how one uses them how one assesses competing claims using them) are themselves norms of feminist discourse

another example. a friend of mine does a lot of community organising in a city in the uk where recently, there has been a noticeable shift away from serving vegetarian food. the initial preference for vegetarian food was shaped by cultures of activist veganism, whether ecologically or socially conscious or both but increasingly the spaces my friend is moving in are being influenced by migrant communities who are willing and able to cook huge vats of eg, goat curry for group meals. has the choice of food become more ‘normal’ or less? it’s a complex question, right? what is actually at stake is two rival sets of dissenting norms which are at once incompatible with one another, and simultaneously at odds with ‘the normal’

even without getting into ‘subversion’ (another v complex term), to say something dissents from one set of dissenting-norms does not actually tell u much about its relationship to ‘the normal’ because the normal is already internally differentiated and because there are as many individual sets of norms as there are possible discourses, communities, practices. you might actually need to assess a case as itself and state why you like or dislike something and yknow, retain some curiosity about the world which is full of ppl who consider things u find almost unimaginable really quite everyday, and vice versa

[ymutate]

Kiyoshi Saitō (Japanese, 1907–1997)

"Beauty Contest", 1973.

Woodblock Print, 29.8 × 29.9 cm.

Private Collection.

[aisling-saoirse]

Electric Brook, Long Valley, NJ - January 18th 2026

[weepingwidar]

Rabia S. Akhtar (Pakistani, 1992) - Dumb Canes (Enchanted Song) (2024)

[specialagentartemis]

“This recipe is perfect for weeknights—it only takes 30 minutes!” and and the first ingredient is an entire butternut squash cut into 1-inch cubes

[melanchol1e-deactivated20250809]

karen jerzyk

[ma7moudgaza2]

Are you a university student trying to learn under normal circumstances and still finding it difficult? Let me tell you about myself. I'm Mahmoud from Gaza, a computer systems engineer with only two semesters left to graduate. I'm about to get my degree. Famine is ravaging us, but that's not the main obstacle. It's the fees. To enter this semester's exams, I need to secure the required fees, which are about $800. These are the last two semesters, and I'll be done with university. I'm worried and afraid of falling behind an additional year. I must get this amount to finish this semester!

Dear student, to be able to access Moodle, you must pay 20% of the tuition fees for the registered hours for the second semester 2024/2025 as a minimum through payment methods: bank transfer, PayPal, or mobile Pay. Click here for payment methods. After payment, the notification must be delivered to Professor Raafat Muammar via WhatsApp.

Here is the exam schedule, the first exam starts on August 9th and this amount must be collected before this period to pay to the university and enter the exam!

Give me a chance to complete my education, donate what you can for me so that I can become an engineer and help my family and my country

Fundraiser || PayPal || Vetting 1 || Vetting 2

@feluka @sayruq @gothhabiba

[ma7moudgaza2]

It's a new goal for Mahmoud from Gaza, and this might send me into a deep depression!! I finished my university studies, but I can't get my degree because of accumulated fees!!! I need your help to get my degree, please 😭 The amount I need is $2000, and I can't afford it on my own. I work with a low income and support my family amidst the huge and expensive costs of living in Gaza! Therefore, you must donate to me in order to preserve my psychological well-being and so that I don't resort to going to a psychiatrist. I need my degree for a job with a stable income or to complete my education in a Master's program.

[ma7moudgaza2]

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that I managed to save $700 from my savings to get the certificate, leaving me with only $1300 left!

The bad news is that the master's scholarship application closes in 6 days, and I need to get the certificate to complete the application!

[ma7moudgaza2]

The days are getting closer and time is getting shorter, and I'm still at the same pace. I haven't received any donations! I don't think I'll ever be what I want to be. I've been consumed…

[corpsenurse]

‼️please read mahmouds statements and share+support‼️

@peppi-mint @dragonlegendantique @theclodofclods @commiekinkshamer @skkfujoshi @veelzebub-the-dingus @artistredfox @emosyzoth

@childofpurgatory @brie-is-confused @infinityreacharound @kakapo555 @faggotfungus @strawbee-s @rocksnstars @quiggyballs @myargentavislove11 @serpentmimic @gothmods @dark-lord-of-awesomeness @asudogi @himboclown @ash-angelics @halflifegifs @sporesgalaxy @virovac

@scoutbot @rejhhhh @eraserheadbaby2 @tundramoth @omegaologist @night-crawler08 @marxismleninismmangumism @dyketastics @zackfairmutual @grandmazad @arcann @aeromaya @sundog-blr @raan-miir-tah @flashingdaydreams @lesbianboyfriend @junkirat @slippy-the-eight-legged-horse @antennas-to-heaven @foulapollo @jayaorgana @krissyblues @pinkwitchland @gamer-goo @specialshinytrinkets @legoyuri @bizarrebulb @poisonseller @waveypedia @anidorikiladratalianna @trans-soapberry @platypusparfait @kawaiifantasma @the-meesher @vita-e @cryptdmoth @m00n-jellies @pickledangel @turnin2adragonandflyaway @vaas @cfo-of-antifa @yiddishfisting @sageleavesreality @sleepy-waffle @wildandmoody @autistickaitovocaloid @sorryforpartyrocking @adarinas @pisskink69420 @monokumasego

[corpsenurse]



@greasydoghole @tut557 @blanketofbees @zorawitch @septiphadrean @rajbows @malphym @c0ckedgun @hauntedclaymore @harlowwinters101 @drunkestwizard @pomegranatepip @kiirodora @poisonseller @melancholic @1ts0kn0ttobeok @talloraven @c-u-c-koo-4-40k @butterflyfritillary @3t22 @st0r-fruit @sylviaaaaaaaaaaaa @druidquest @bl00d-hail @theothergal @yiddishfisting @all-alone-in-the-moonlight @mar64ds @sunshineforshine @autistickaitovocaloid @seths-heart @artoatsblog @siblingthethird @spilledmagic13 @yulelog @tyrannodokuro @serpentmimic @vaas @dreamlit-wanderer @phoradendron @oldmistahj @the-bogstomper @inkbomber @nvcr @boy-and-girl-crazy123456 @sporesgalaxy @squeiky @cinturongazo @sensessences @sahara-silver

@atomikitten @goodnighttmoon @anxiouslytrekking @minosbull @extremelycursedimages @bitterdancer-everturning @neon-draws-sometimes @evenstaria @womenbehotfr @guineapigwitch @sillyseasides @depressedthembo @bottomgrowthmindset @biggaysnakedemon @tubapun @battleteacake @chocohedgie @summer-skye-64 @scary-ivy @slugghee @ethanfundraising @swinginmandarin @ratduude @vanillafloats @paparoach @sockdooe @lexd @atlasandheracles @kyoshikas @dodi-li @i-am-an-atomic-bomb @cyberoticism @queenstravelingdarling @soupedepates @meanling @feathermedics @animatorfun @coffinsandroses @mrmaniac0118 @gremlinandacrow @femmehysteria @khbsd @ruubicon @nullsd @impgender @belkscrotes @gamer-goo @85-rend @honestlyboringperson @ghost-himbo

[enchantedbook]

'Tales of Mystery and Imagination 'illustrated by Harry Clarke, 1923

[nooralanqar3]

October 23, 2019 a date forever engraved in my heart, the day my little princess Rajaa was born.

We once lived in a home filled with joy, laughter, and the scent of life itself.

I still remember the pictures from her previous birthday when we went shopping and enjoyed the day together. Those small moments meant more than the whole world.

I hadn’t thought about celebrating her birthday this year; our lives are filled with worries, and we no longer have the time or means for such things.

But since last night, when Rajaa realized that today is her birthday, she came to me with her innocent voice and said:

“Mom, what will you get me? I want a pink cake, and I want to invite my friends!”

I could only answer her with a few words:

“Tomorrow, my love, I’ll see what I can do…”

And today, everything can change with your help.

All I wish for is to bring back a moment from the past, to plant a little joy in her heart that makes her forget the harshness of reality.

With your support and donations, I can make this special day come alive again to make her smile, to remind her that she is still a child who deserves happiness and love.

[nooralanqar3]

Today is my son Hussein’s birthday.

I didn’t tell him not because I forgot, but because I can’t give him a cake or a gift like he was used to in previous years.

He went to school like it was any other day.

Maybe he’ll write the date in his notebook and remember on his own…

or maybe he won’t notice, and forgetting will be kinder to a child’s heart.

My wish today is simple:

to see him happy, even if only with a smile,

and to feel that this day did not pass heavily on him.

As you stood by me before and shared moments of joy with us,

I ask you today to help me create happiness

in my son Hussein’s heart

even with a kind word, a share, or a donation.

[nooralanqar3]

When it comes to my children, he makes me weak in front of him.

[zinaanqar16]

Sometimes, asking for donations on Tumblr feels like shouting into the void, with nothing left but tagging people in the hope that someone will notice. The sense of despair grows with every ignored plea, like drowning while screaming with no one to hear. If you can help, please consider donating—every little bit makes a difference.

[ostdrossel]

Today, some fun new visitors came by, more native Sparrows. Three American Tree Sparrows, which look a lot like Chipping Sparrows but have a distinct dot on the chest and a two-colored beak, and again the White-Throated Sparrows. It remains cold, I hope to see the Fox Sparrow again too.