Klisz

August 1, 2026 - Every morning in Gaza, the search for water begins.

Video journalist Bisan Owda follows children carrying heavy water containers, families waiting for water trucks, and the people working to keep one of the few desalination plants still running.

Along the way, Bisan reveals what has been destroyed, why clean water has become so hard to find, and what it now takes to provide water for millions of people in Gaza. [video]

if you happen to know what common greek and latin roots mean you can spot someone mistranslating them, which comes in handy very often

normal sounding words are almost never coined as acronyms. if someone claims something is an acronym you should literally always fact check it

sometimes the story presented by a proposed etymology falls apart if you like. think about it. why would a hypothetical continent be named after an animal speculated to not live there? why would an idiom's original form be something that very obviously sounds like something you'd say as a comeback to the version everyone already knows?

tumblr: you're calling me racist? how do you think that makes my non-white oc feel?

"flying" is an 'evergreen' mechanic in magic the gathering, which means it's been used in every single expansion in the 30 years since the game came out, from 1993 to the present day.

flying is commonly cited by mark rosewater, the game's head designer, as the game's best mechanic in part because it's so intuitive: flying creatures can't be blocked by creatures without flying¹. it's elegant and crucially it's memorable. it instantly 'makes sense'. you hear that and think 'oh, they just fly over the other creatures, okay'. very few players misunderstand flying. and even better, the art of the game helps to reinforce that. almost every flying creature ever printed is shown either actively flying/levitating or with huge conspicuous wings. remove the text from cards and ask players to tell you which creatures have flying and they'd get it right 99% of the time.

in fact, the biggest reason why anyone ever has a problem with flying is that the art being such a reliable tell means it can also mislead them: breaching hippocamp got a few players confused because the art makes it look like it flies. rosewater considers whippoorwill's art to be a mistake because it confused players by straight up depicting a winged bird flying on a card without it:

so, you know, the rigid art/flavor-mechanics divide would hold that these are just cases of players being mistaken, of not understanding the mechanics of the card. but as anyone who has tried to write rules text for anything will tell you, if your rules text is consistently misread in the same way, you're doing something wrong! the players who played as though breaching hippocamp and whippoorwill had flying had their mechanical experience severely impacted by the art!

and those edge cases aside, the fact that flying is usually so conceptually intuitive and easy to convey with art makes a huge difference to the mechanical design of cards! a card with a more complicated keyword like ninjutsu, undying, wither or evolve loses a lot of the space it has allocated for complexity. flying, however, uses almost none of the mental bandwidth that goes into understanding a card, and this has an extremely tangible impact on what kind of cards can get flying compared to those other keywords! if you can rely on the art and in some cases the creature type (birds, dragons, angels) to make the 'flying' on the card 'stick' in a players' head, you don't need to worry about how it contributes to the overall memory and complexity issues that card might pose.

& none of these things would be true--i.e. the 'mechanics and gameplay' of the game would be substantially different--if flying were just called "Untitled Ability Keyword #1"

Game mechanics and narrative/flavor/aesthetics are indeed separate components, that are both arts and sciences in their own right, and the points you lay out here support the thesis that the best game and game mechanics are one's that marry the two separate components as closely as possible. The counter example of Breaching Hippocamp and Wippoorwill are examples of a disconnect between the two, leading to confusion.

Flying, the game mechanic, is intuitive because it matches with Flying, the narrative concept as closely as the two can ever match up, to the point I don't think any other game comes close, but to say they are one and the same goes a little too far for me. For example, there are several instances of cards with the narrative theme of a creature being thrown, that are interpreted with different mechanics, for example;

Fling, the card for which the effect is nicknamed, sacrifices the creature to deal damage directly, while the lesser known Lowland Oaf (i misremembered how several cards worked before finding this one) grants a creature flying (until it dies). These cards have the same narrative (a creature is thrown through the air with great force), but different mechanics (direct damage vs combat damage), both married closely to create an intuitive experience.

For a counter example, Banding, the mechanic so complex it will never get reprinted, is intuitive on a narrative level (or should be), but does not match up with the game rules in any way that allows for easy understanding