This Slaps Honestly

Cannot Stress Enough how important it is to read Howl’s Moving Castle written by Diana Wynn Jones immediately after watching Howl’s Moving Castle directed by Hayao Miyazaki. When he made the movie he was of course upset with war and thus included it in the film, but you gotta understand. You really Gotta Understand. Every time in the movie where Howl turns the door dial black to travel to an absolutely hellish warscape? You know where that same dial takes him in the book? The Real World Country Of Wales

Frank Castle being the only other person aside from Karen and Matt to mourn and be outraged by what happened to Foggy was not what I was expecting. In fact his outward anger at what happened to Foggy nearly rivaled Matt's.

His relationship with Foggy was testy at best--so to hear him actually call Foggy by his name and say he deserved better was very gut wrenching.

I don't even know if he ever spoke Foggy's name until Born Again, but the way he did it and the reverence in which he did was something else.

He compared Foggy and Foggy's death to his own child, and a need to exact vengeance.

I struggle to comprehend those of you who say Israel is prolonging this war because they "want" to. Because they want to hurt other people, or because they want to conquer the middle east, all the reasons are equally stupid.

Do any of you really think any of us WANT to be doing this? Do the parents WANT to be crying over the graves of their children? Do the soldiers WANT to be fighting for their lives and possibly losing them in the heat and the fire and the dust? Do the refugees from the endangered areas WANT to be crammed in hotel rooms with thousands of strangers? Do the loved ones of the hostages WANT to be outside in all kinds of weather, screaming for their return?

Do the kids WANT to be drawing the soldiers pictures so they'll have something to smile at amid the death and destruction? Do the teenagers WANT to spend hours on their feet packaging food and supplies?

Does every single citizen in this country WANT to dread every knock on the door and every telephone call?

I don't think the word "want" is in the vocabulary of this war. I know that the distance between the average leftist overseas and the average Israeli is pretty unbridgeable right now, but surely this can't be that difficult to understand. We are currently thinking in terms of survival. There is no "want" and "don't want" involved in this war anymore. There is "need", "must" and "fuck, I guess we have to do this, don't we?".

That's about it.

Hope that cleared something up.

Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.

הדבר הכי יפה שאני משאיר מאחור

הוא אורה של החמה;

שנית, הכוכבים הבורקים ואור הלבנה,

וגם מלפפונים בשלים ותפוחים ואגסים.

פרקסילה, המאה ה-5 לפנה"ס. תרגום מיוונית: יורם ברונובסקי

מִי יִמְנֶה אֶת כָּל הַדְּבָרִים הַטּוֹבִים / שֶׁיֶּשְׁנָם, שֶׁיֶּשְׁנָם בָּעוֹלָם: / אוֹר הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ, וְיָם, וּבְרַק כּוֹכָבִים, / וְטִפּוֹת שֶׁל מָטָר, וְרוּחוֹת מְנַשְּׁבִים, / וְשֶׁלִּי הֵם וְגַם שֶׁל כֻּלָּם.

מתוך השיר: יום, לאה גולדברג. ''כל שירי הילדים'', ספריית פועלים.

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

I recently learned how much changes you can do without doing anything drastic or illegal. I won't call it anarchy, but you can do so many things. I recently noticed my city hall is throwing trash in the forest next to my house. I organized a forest cleaning, and made someone from the city hall come to give me trash bags. I told him about the trash they are throwing in the forest and he just called some people and they cleaned it within a day or two. This was a huge amount of trash that I couldn't physically pick up, and they just did it happily. People are good and support good things if you act for it. Also some people I don't know came to the forest cleaning and it is much nicer to go out now. It made a change

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

it's sad to see that the side characters lack depth and storytelling in this show. muse was wasted badly. heather could've talked muse out of that but instead she said he was a coward. cherry and kirsten don't interest me at all. buck ain't a wesley but he kinda did grow on me with that last scene. daniel did also grow on me after he threatened the girl bc we realize that maybe he's not the guy to mess with. tbh i have mixed feelings about this show now.

they're fun to draw