Me Gusta Kokaina

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Hello, I'm Hani from Gaza, and I'm 23 years old. I've been living in Belgium for a year, and I'm an inline skater. I'm collecting donations to get my family out to safety from northern Gaza to Egypt because I can't afford the large amount of money needed. I'm here in Belgium in the process of rebuilding my life and achieving my dreams.

After losing my house and its destruction on October 13th, my family became displaced in tents, and on September 15th, I lost my father due to the attack on Al-Shifa Hospital. My father was suffering from kidney failure and passed away due to lack of treatment. He was the breadwinner of my family. Now I am responsible for my family, which consists of 10 members, including 3 minors, and my 18-year-old brother. The rest are my sisters, including two toddlers, one is 3 years old, and the other is 2 years old.

My siblings were university students and had dreams too, but because of the war, they lost everything; they lost the university, our home, and our father. They aspire to continue their studies at the university, but the war destroyed everything. I'm now trying to get them out of Gaza to Egypt to rebuild their shattered lives. To do that, they need to be evacuated, and they need to pay for the coordination into Egypt. Due to war time prices, they're asking for 5,000 euros per person to get them out of Gaza because northern Gaza has been completely wiped out, with insufficient food and people scattered among the rubble of homes under heavy bombardment. I hope you can help me through your donations or by sharing the story with friends. Thank you so much with lots of love

https://gofund.me/5d6469bf

#gh

Don’t forget…

FYI, this was an actual streetlamp in Wrocław, Poland. Local services removed the overgrowth because apparently nearby people had trouble sleeping with this by their windows.

she has a gift for you

💧The Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale💧

Another Legend of Zelda species info sheet! This time it’s one of my faves: the Zora! It was fun trying to compile all the lore throughout the timelines 🐬 All of this is, as always, elaborating on canon with some sprinkles of my own lore ✌️

Featuring Princess Ruto & random River Zora (slide 1), Queen Rutela and Prince Ralis & Zora Link (slide 2). Fun fact: Zora Link’s design is based on a Mahi-mahi fish!

What species next? Rito or Sheikah?

Felt like doing something picture book like.

me and my mutuals reblogging tumblr posts

Please help the family of a non-verbal autistic child (who has been losing weight because he only eats certain kinds of food, largely unavailable during this time) leave Gaza!

They are almost halfway there btw

This is absolutely beautiful

Ocean Return AU 1/???

uh racing au??

✨“Time passes. People move. Like a river’s flow, it never ends.” 💫

What’s happening now in Palestine is unacceptable, but do not despair! That’s what they want! That’s why they cut off communications in Gaza! They want people to give up, they want people to believe wholeheartedly that nothing can be done so that they can continue with impunity and write history as they wish, to paint themselves as victors of a war that was never a war to begin with! Keep sharing and raising their voices, share the stories of the people, keep the story of Palestine alive! They hide behind their bombs and their chemical warfare and their western propaganda but they cannot silence the masses! They can only wish they had an ounce of the bravery the Palestinian people have, standing their ground against such an overwhelming force! May Palestine be free, from the river to the sea. May the eyes of cowards never sleep!

a lot of people have already pointed out how totk has a lot of themes of imperialism and generally leans conservative ideologically, but what i think is interesting is how totk subtly redefines what a “researcher” is.

zelda wants to be a researcher in botw, and what this means in the context of botw is largely someone who works with sheikah technology. she wants to figure out ancient sheikah tech, she has an interest in botany and otherwise nature and biology (the whole silent princess and the frog thing), robbie and purah, the two characters who are the closest to us seeing what a researcher in the context of botw is are basically inventors. in totk, however, the main researchers who are presented to us are all historians.

this is an interesting pivot, because in botw zelda is not really interested in history. if anything, the one who’s deeply concerned with history is rhoam, wanting to preserve historical tradition and his uncritical reliance on said tradition and historical precedent is what leads them to their doom. in botw, zelda is narratively opposed to history, if anything, all the ancient tech backfires on them and traditions fail to awaken zelda’s power. zelda’s urge to be a researcher is in wanting to understand the world around her, not just blindly follow ancient plans but rather have agency within them.

totk, however, is obsessed with ancient plans. the only real moment where zelda gets to geek out in totk is her getting all giddy about finding out more about the divine origins of hyrule. all the researchers in the game are concerned with finding out more about the zonai. since all the mentions of ancient sheikah technology are scrubbed from the game purah and robbie read more as strange outliers, the sheikah slate is no longer, now it’s the purah pad, a product of purah rather than something larger. the whole game is literally about following an ancient plan, a plan most characters don’t fully understand as they sign up for it. totk’s main story is built on confusion, on the characters not knowing what’s fully going on but having faith in ancient sages telling them what to do. in botw, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand was the thing that doomed you. in totk, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand is the gimmick.

that juxtaposition between the two games has an ideological through line: botw posits that progress is necessary. mindlessly relying on tradition doesn’t work. prophecies are omens, not instructions. history must be learnt from, not repeated. the ancient sheikah aren’t a group to be emulated, but rather to be learnt from, considering their machinery backfired and the royal family betrayed them. totk, however, is obsessed with the mythical history of hyrule, a time where everything was idyllic until one bad man showed up, a time we must emulate in order to win. i already talked about how the past in totk is zelda’s life pre calamity but better here, but that also plays into the idolisation of that era and its royalty. in botw, even the myth of the first calamity preserves the fact that the yiga clan has origins in the royal’s family persecution of the sheikah, even the time when they successfully held back the calamity is tinged with mistakes that still affect the world ten thousand years later. in totk, ganondorf’s origins are nebulous. nobody provoked him, nobody did anything wrong, he’s just evil because he is.

a lot of right wing ideologies are hinged on preservation, but more than that: the belief in the nebulous mythical past in which everything was better. “make america great again”, the fascist’s idolisation of ancient rome which is represented largely inaccurately, look at any conservative rhetoric and you’ll see people complaining about how things nowadays are ruined or are being ruined, how in the past things were this way and they’re not anymore, which is bad. the belief in the fact that in some past period we were great and are not anymore, and the strive to emulate that past is a trait highly typical of right wing ideologies. and in totk the past as a great era is an idea presented completely uncritically, the narrative is entirely controlled by the game and doesn’t dwell on any of the inconsistencies in this idea.

now, obviously, not every story in which a great ancient era exists is fascist, right wing or conservative. but to me what’s interesting specifically in totk is this shift between the two games: botw is critical of the past. it’s critical of arrogantly repeating history, it’s critical of having blind faith in great relics of the past. totk isn’t. totk idolizes the past, totk tells legends and tells you to believe them without any doubts. botw believes researchers are those who seek to understand the world, innovate it and solve problems without relying on ancient ways. totk believes researchers are those who discover ancient instructions, ancient ways and relay them to great men in the present to be followed. the four mainline regional quests in botw are about discovering four ancient relics that are terrorising the land and fixing the mistakes of the past. the four mainline regional quests in totk are about discovering four ancient legends are true, and receiving instructions from an ancient sage on what to do.

totk is not simply neutral, it is ideologically conservative in stark contrast to botw, because of the things it chooses to leave uncriticised, notably the things botw was very poignant about examining critically. the way totk redefines what is a researcher is indicative of this, indicative of the way it chooses to idolize or present as an unexamined good that which was nuanced in botw. totk isn’t just conservative in the sense that it presents uncritically a “good king” and “evil conquerer”, it goes deeper, it’s notable because botw was starkly opposed to the thematic axioms totk presents.

i just think it’s very interesting that they made a sequel to botw, and completely redefined or otherwise ignored botw’s thematic core.

Volume 1 of "Secret Confessions to a Sage" (Pages 01-27)

Thought this may help with binge reading! <3