im sooooo septic im soooo goddamn bacterial

hi im saf. it/he. free palestine. art stuff primarily on my sideblog.

[emmaharwoods]

you can click on this button once daily to help palestine and support other causes in the middle east for free. it takes literally 5 seconds and could help save lives so please take the time to click and share this link.

[grelliam]

#oh it raises money thru ad revenue and ur click confirms the value to advertisers. neat

[coping-via-clint-eastwood-deact]

YO YOU CAN DONATE FOR FREE EVERYBODY GO DO THIS NOW

[justnoodlefishthings]

"Coca-Cola made an AI ad!"

"McDonald's releases AI Christmas commercial!!"

Don't care didn't ask plus here's a beautifully animated ad for a French supermarket that was made by actual artists

[nopanamaman]

Preview of POINT//ZERO, a PAFL one-shot scheduled to release in 2026!

[carbonmoth463]

The room - The meaning of his tears

[threadsofsaffron]

i bought Z.A.T.O. as a birthday gift for myself and binged the whole thing. i dont think im ever going to be the same again. i have thoughts im going to refine after my brain is unfrazzled.

[nopanamaman]

Z.A.T.O. // I Love the World and Everything In It is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux!

It's a free visual novel in the mystery genre. Please give it a shot:)

Steam || Itchio

[nopanamaman]

What are the internet and media like in PAFL?

The Inner Net

The online space of the Eastern Commonwealth (let’s call it that for short) is cut off from the rest of the world similarly to the real-life Chinese Firewall. It blocks access to the grand majority of Outer Net services, with most social media having its own Inner Net alternatives. The blockade can be bypassed with VPN and deep web protocols, but they don’t go unnoticed.

The Inner Net uses deep packet inspection to detect and slow down users that run VPN or Tor-like protocols. That said, it usually overlooks short sessions. So you will be fine as long as you aren’t regularly running them from the same IP and don’t use too much data. 

For example, you can: 

use VPN to quickly search something up on the Outer Web;

scroll through a foreign news site for 10 minutes;

download an image or a text document. 

You cannot: 

use VPN to watch a movie and expect it to go unnoticed; 

download a music album;

download a game.

TURN THAT OFF!!!

But what about stalkers? If you’ve read this post, you know that stalkers rely on deep web platforms for essential business information. How do they do it? The answer is pluggable transports, which mimic innocent traffic during longer and more data-heavy sessions. 

Since download links to such transports are cleared from the Inner Web, the software is distributed via offline peer-to-peer networks or flash drives. They are also very costly.

Social Media

The biggest social network in the country is НаСвязи – NaSviazi or NS / Nasik / Nasvai (as in насвай - naswar) for short. It’s an all-encompassing platform for instant messaging, image and video sharing, communities, browser games, and music.

Yura’s NS profile. Note the censorship of a forbidden movie title.

Each user account is tied to their personal ID, so one person cannot create multiple NS profiles. Users can change their screen names, but doing so requires approval from website administrators. A request to change your real name to an alias will be declined.

But not all platforms are this strict on personal tracking. Blogging websites are generally very lenient when it comes to customisation, making them popular among teenagers and adults alike.

Example page from the Boiler blogging platform. Very similar to Tumblr, but less niche.

Anonymous imageboards exist as well. Of course, they’re monitored just as closely as any other social media and users can be easily tracked down. Aside from avoiding criticisms of the Party, it’s exactly the same as real-world 2ch.

Online Culture

The Inner Net’s culture isn’t too different from the post-soviet online space in real life. Post-ironic memes are just as prevalent, but have emerged and rose to prominence a couple years earlier. Anti-humour, absurdism, and abstract humour are popular in general, partially because they’re immune to censorship.

 “FARTED”

Political discussion is a lot less robust even on platforms that are meant to be anonymous. The government has full access to everyone’s message history and private data, mainly monitoring particular keywords. 

This has led to people using slang, euphemisms, or just censoring the words themselves with numbers and symbols in order to discuss certain topics. This is still a risky practice, however, since common workaround spellings and slang eventually get added to the system. As a result, these codewords fall out of use on the internet, but sometimes stick in real life lexicon.

Some examples include: 

Космонавты (“cosmonauts”) - riot police, armoured police force;

Свадьба (“wedding”) - death penalty, execution;

Тушить капусту (“stewing cabbage”) - earning money illegally, particularly on the black market;

Сбор (“assembly”) - mass arrest;

Венок (“wreath”) - fabricated criminal case.

Example of slang use.

Politics aside, popular online trends include:

Lootposting. This refers to showing off supposed artefacts found outside the Zone. 90% of the time these are forgeries or misidentified regular objects. Cases of real artefact discovery often result in hospitalisation or confiscation.

Anomaly diving. An extreme kind of movement where vloggers sneak into temporarily restricted anomalous areas and film various phenomena up close. If it doesn’t result in death, it results in fines – luckily, such videos tend to make enough money to cover the expenses.

Forest challenge. A briefly popular challenge where the person spends 24 hours in the deeper parts of the Anomalous Forest. Died down after a teenager’s body was discovered melted into a tree.

Books and Film

Much like the internet, heavy censorship is imposed on literature and film. A designated government committee controls which overseas movies and books can be legally accessed and evaluates local productions and writings in the same way.

Though, it bears mentioning that certain film companies make separate region-specific versions of their films to increase the likelihood of passing the censors, similar to how some Western movie productions are recut to better cater to China.

Stalker movies struggle with accuracy.

As a result of its many restrictions, the local film industry lags behind its foreign counterparts in terms of technical development and budget. Though, it does have a strong identity of its own. 

While a lot of real world post-soviet countries started copying the look and feel of American movies specifically around 2000-2010s, the film industry of the Eastern Commonwealth has maintained a vibe that’s more comparable to USSR and 90s-era cinema. 

On average, it tends to have more subdued editing and slower pacing. The most popular genres among the masses are crime dramas, anomaly dramas, and romance. There are directors who try to emulate foreign films, namely action flicks, but the lack of resources makes it difficult to achieve the same level of polish.

Plenty of trash to choose from.

Television is not much different from what it’s like in real life. No criticism of the ruling party allowed, but raunchy daytime shows are a-okay. A significant chunk of programming is local bootlegs of popular overseas sitcoms.

Of course, people still find ways to watch forbidden productions. Spread through the deep web and flash drives, they’re not as inaccessible as one might think. A good chunk of teenagers have seen at least one illegal film by the time they leave high school.

Banned movie night.

The situation with books is similar, with most banned literature being distributed in digital formats. Since it’s not nearly as data-heavy as video content, it can be easily downloaded with a VPN – as long as you’re not downloading entire libraries, that is. Still, that restricted accessibility also means a lot of books remain untranslated, which further limits their reach.

On a side note, anime, manga, and light novels are almost never censored and have been very popular across the Commonwealth since the early 2000s. They’re not exactly mainstream, since anime fans are still seen as nerdy by the general public. But it’s a big subculture.

Gaming

The gaming scene is similar to real life, being very PC-centric. MOBAs and FPS multiplayers are massively popular, with a lot of overseas titles being available (though, the ability to connect to servers outside your region is locked).

DEFEAT!

There are plenty of titles that are inspired by stalker operations, artefact hunting, mutant hunting, and other Zone-related hobbies. These games always run the risk of being banned for promoting illicit activities and/or discrediting the police and military. But they’re popular nonetheless, often being distributed physically.

There are a lot of experimental projects. Since local developers often find it difficult to compete with high-budget gaming studios (unless they receive government backing, which is usually reserved for propaganda-adjacent projects), they’re more driven to explore unconventional ideas and gameplay loops. This has resulted in a janky, but intriguing indie scene.

Notoriously difficult survival sim.

Bootlegs of popular banned titles are also fairly common. In some cases it’s thanks to local developers seeing an opportunity to fill a niche and just ripping off an existing game while making it politically correct. In other cases it’s the government itself sponsoring the development of alternatives to popular foreign titles.

Author’s note

It’s always interesting to think about how culture develops in closed off regions. But nothing is fully closed off in the modern world – and knowing the dubious reliability of government-run systems across (at least) Russia and Belarus, it’s hard to imagine they’d be able to cut off the flow of outside information completely.

It does make things more boring. But it also lets Yura canonically be a League player and I think that’s very funny.

[sh4rkseye]

My work for the @backstagezine !!

This piece was made as a tribute to @nopanamaman ahdhfj (｡>﹏<) im not gonna yap about it too much here since i have already done so in the zine itself but yaas

[flayyr]

collab with sola.rise (ig)

[skobbeloff]

who let him drink and drive

[thecrowrevolutionandsacrifice]

cyaris' birthday is august 1st

[threadsofsaffron]

I deleted Tumblr from my phone and haven't had the motivation to put this up

[zorangezest]

woahhh I'm back again

I hope this isn't odd to ask but do you happen to have any fullbody coloured images of the DDDT cast and possibly their heights...

I want to draw like fullbody doodles of them eventually in the future KSJSK

helloooo! ty for the ask it was about time i made a height chart, here’s all the current active characters in the story!

and here’s a bunch of background characters who almost never show up (arcee doesn’t even appear in the story) but I liked their designs way too much so they’re also getting a lineup! also deepfreeze is there

drawing this actually made me realize something….

[moarf13]

[aridante]

“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”

[zorangezest]

did you think you could afford to love

on another note I found the perfect song for this au’s soundwave…it sounds a little like he’s singing in a few of the parts, and the perfect song for frenzy, especially the last bit, i can just imagine him angrily strumming and singing his heart out🫡

[catchymemes]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

[technofeudalism]