I am new at this

Also it's a bit off topic but I'm a bit curious on your opinions on Zuko likening the disappearance of his mother to the explicit death of Katara's mother. I knkw you spoke on this a while ago while talking about TSR, pointing out how he does a lot of projecting in that episode, but I've always just chalked that up to him just generally being self centered when he's around women so it's really just a knee jerk reaction (I am being so serious I don't recall him ever making an effort in acknowledging the inner world of the girls he meets in the show at least in the way he eventually does for boys.) Please feel free to respond to this privately too if it's an ask you don't feel like replying to on your page :)

I’ll answer your ask in two parts, since each paragraph is distinct in character:

1. firstly, I think the assumptions you’re making as to the “obvious” reasons for katara’s weeping rely on premises that aren’t actually established in the text, while ignoring the more overt (sub)textual cues here. something really crucial I think most people dismiss when discussing katara’s characterization in “the runaway” is that the reason she disapproves of toph’s scams isn’t actually because she’s more mature and rational and level-headed than the rest of the group; it’s because toph excluded her, and aang and sokka let her. she masks her hurt with disapproval over their schemes because that’s a normal human instinct to feeling left out: “it’s fine that you didn’t invite me; I didn’t want to come anyway, and in fact, I’m actually better than you for staying home, even though you didn’t actually give me a choice in the matter.” katara is a fourteen year old girl and a well-written character. the episode never explicitly spells out that she’s mad at toph for this reason, but it shouldn’t have to.

Bronze Ooni Head, 12th-15th Century. National Museum of Ifẹ̀, Nigeria.

Now, it's true that Marx insists repeatedly that he does not preach morality, but that's a methodological commitment, not one of aims. Marx makes this clear in The German Ideology. In it, he criticizes the Left Hegelians for seeking to change the world merely by changing people's ideas of it:

[They] consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas … as the real chains of men [...] [they] take it to be evident that [they] have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness

Marx rejects this. As a materialist, he argues that there can only be change by addressing the underlying material conditions, and condemns these attempts to change the world by merely switching on a new philosophical lens to be pointless idealism:

The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ phrases, are the staunchest conservatives … they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are combating solely the phrases of this world

But Marx absolutely does think that there is a real existing world that is worth combating, only not by way of idealism. This is why he insists on not preaching morality: because it is pointless to tell people not to be egoists, when egoism is the product and expression of the underlying social relations. So Marx instead unabashedly promote the self-interest of one specific social class, the proletariat. Does this mean that Marx does not care about "the poors", about what benefits "everyone"? No, of course not. Once again that is misguided. Marx militate against the oppression of the worker by the capitalist rather than that of the peasant by the aristocrat not because he does not care about the latter but because only the former can bring about the end of all oppression, the classless society. The proleteriat for Marx has a special role in history because contrary to all previous expressions of class struggle, it has the potential to end class struggle altogether.

As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy of production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary … State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.

Ephraim Moses Lilien     אן דער נאמאשינע (At the Sewing Machine) Also called די וואַמפּיר (The Vampire)     1915

Shabbat Shalom ✨ May it be full of peace and relaxation.

What are your plans? Will you be taking some time to rest? Enjoying with loved ones? Eating delicious food? Being outside in nature?

By the way, let me know if you have any suggestions on what to draw next 🥰

I've got a stack of pre-written scenarios with defined pre-gens though, and they're all written as the jumping-off point for campaigns where the initial story transforms the character in some way, from "you survived this traumatic event that made your hometown alien to you" to "did you accept the power the Thing of Darkest Antiquity offered to kill the tyrannical nobleman or are you a regular fugitive? Because no one was getting out of that situation without taking an axe to that guy."

That latter one worked so incredibly well at a convention it gave me an idea for sequels and a novel.

hmm, yeah, i think in this case you have to ask 'what are you trying to get out of lifepaths' ? because if they're just small bonuses tied to anodyne biographical facts, i think it's clear that they'd be boring, right?

in my opinion, depending on what serves your game best, you have a few options:

just make them Bigger

you mention writing 'character-agnostic' ones, and i feel like that kind of defeats the point of lifepaths, right? the purpose should be to Produce a very specific life story. i always like random character creation tables more when it feels like you can be pushed in wild and strange directions you wouldn't have considered. for example, here's a few of the random Quirks you can roll in my cape game underside:

these were a blast to write because i tried to make as many of them--while still offering a lot of laterality to players who roll them to decide on the details or what they mean--big, weird swings that people might not necessarily make on their own.

2. make them interconnected

but maybe that's not the tone of your game, you're doing mundane modern day or low fantasy. that's cool--if you want to keep them small and mundane, just having them flow into each other would do a lot, i reckon. for example, the 'orthodox education' you give is pretty boring! but if you set the system up so that someone can go through lifepaths and have their character go from 'orthodox education' to 'sellsword', or vice versa, then suddenly you've opened up a well of intrigue for someone to sculpt a backstory around.

3. plug them in

Poland, 19th century. Egg decorated with micrographic text from the Song of Songs, handwritten in ink, 7 x 5.

I have read your manifesto. I profoundly disagree with it.

To be clear: the desired end state you describe, a genuinely multinational Israel where being Israeli Jewish and being Israeli Arab are co-equal, where neither identity is subordinate to the other, is actually not that far from what I'd want too. The problem is that your theoretical framework is idealist in precisely the places where it needs to be materialist, applies its own principles asymmetrically, and proposes a transitional vehicle (the Jewish national liberation state) that is structurally incompatible with where you claim to be going.

Starting with the indigeneity framework, which is the root of my disagreement. You construct a three-part definition: precolonial autochthonous ethnogenesis with unbroken cultural continuity, intimate historic attachment to the land expressed in both base and superstructure, and subjection to colonialism.

But here's where it goes wrong. Your framework functions in the actual argument to justify a concrete present-day power relation — Israeli military and political dominance over Palestinians — by reframing that dominance as decolonization. The material effect of your framework is to consistently directs analytical attention away from the observable facts of Palestinian dispossession and toward a supposed inherent Jewish cultural entitlement to the land. That is idealism, not materialism. You make the concrete domination of one people by another analytically secondary to a theory of cultural inheritance. Palestinian Arabs were the demographic majority in historic Palestine before the establishment of the Israeli state, were farming the land, building towns, developing an economy across generations of continuous habitation. Under a materialist analysis, this constitutes a profound and concrete relationship to the land. You manage to subordinate all of this to Jewish cultural memory of ancient connection. Palestinians appear in the argument primarily as a problem to be managed; their identity described as colonial in origin; their national movement as the "primary external threat" to Israel. The indigene-as-subject whose liberation the manifesto claims to champion turns out, when it comes to the Arabs actually living on the land, to be at best an afterthought and at worst an obstacle.

You invoke Fanon in justification, but Fanon wrote from the perspective of the colonized resisting an external imperial power. The structural position of Jewish Israelis in relation to Palestinians is not that position. You cannot coherently deploy Fanon's framework of indigenous liberation while administering a military occupation in which the people under occupation lack basic rights. You acknowledge the occupation is wrong, but treats this as a deviation from true Zionism rather than as a structural consequence of the national liberation project itself. This does no analytical work, except insulating the theory from its own empirical consequences.

Moving to the class analysis. You identify that colonialism functions as a mechanism of class collaboration, extracting value from indigenous land and labor to improve the material conditions of the colonial class and soften revolutionary motivation in the proletariat. Bhut you don’t follow this analysis to its necessary conclusion in the Israeli context. The Israeli Jewish working class functions as a permanent labor aristocracy, enforced through the legal and military architecture of the state itself. The Law of Return, preferential land administration, differential military obligations, housing policy, labor market segmentation: all of these structurally elevate Jewish workers relative to Arab workers not as an incidental feature but as a constitutive one. This means the Jewish working class cannot become a class-for-itself in the Marxist sense without first dismantling the very structure that materially advantages it. Which is an extraordinarily difficult revolutionary ask, because it requires workers to act against their immediate perceived material interests.

More than that: the Israeli Jewish worker benefits from the colonial structure even when exploited by capital. Their relative privilege over Arab workers is real and material, which means genuine proletarian solidarity across the Jewish-Arab divide requires Jewish workers to accept a material leveling, not just an ideological reorientation. Classical Leninist national liberation theory partly sidesteps this problem because the metropole is external — French workers don't lose jobs or housing when Algeria is liberated. Here the metropole is internal. The privilege of Jewish workers is directly constituted by Arab dispossession, so decolonization isn't just a political transformation, it's a zero-sum redistribution within the same labor market. You never seriously grapple with what would motivate Jewish workers to support this, beyond essentially correct theoretical persuasion. That's idealism.

Which brings me to the national question and the "Zionism until full communism" formulation. You draw on the tradition of national self-determination as a transitional stage toward internationalism: you cannot build genuine proletarian solidarity across national lines while one nation is subjugated by another. Agreed. But its application here has a structural problem : the Leninist national liberation framework was developed for colonized peoples resisting an external imperial power. The Zionist case involves a national liberation project that itself displaced another population. This isn't a minor complication. It means the manifesto is trying to apply the conceptual apparatus of the colonized to a group that is, in the relevant present-day power relation, the dominant one. And the "we're not truly Zionist yet" move doesn't answer this, because the question isn't whether current Israeli policy deviates from Zionist ideals. The question is whether the structural logic of a Jewish national liberation state necessarily generates Palestinian subordination regardless of intent.

The present State of Israel is actually instructive here, and not in the way the manifesto would like. It does not formally define itself as an ethnonationalist state. It does not deny citizenship or formal legal equality to non-Jews. It does, constitutionally, give a special national status to Jews. And in practice, despite formal legal equality, Arab citizens have been systematically subordinated : in wealth, in land access, in development budgets, in political representation, in the cultural idiom of the state, in whose security the state regards as its primary mandate. This flows structurally from the state's founding logic: a state constituted for one people's national liberation will tend to reproduce the dominance of that people not through explicit discrimination but through the background conditions it encodes: whose history it commemorates, whose demographic growth it incentivizes, and crucially, whose belonging it treats as primary. In other words, not only the actually existing State of Israel but so too your ideal Zionist Israel will reproduce this oppression, because by its own self-definition it treats one people as more important, more worthy of belonging. The non-Jewish citizens of both Israel are equal in the same sense as proletarians and bourgeois are equal: formally, and not in any way that matters. Your ask that Palestinians dissolve their distinct national identity into a broader Israeli fabric reproduces precisely the false internationalism you elsewhere correctly critiques: the colonial society demanding the indigene forsake their particular identity in exchange for inclusion in a universal still controlled by the dominant group. Jewish identity is not asked to make a comparable dissolution.

What all of this adds up to is, I think, something the manifesto never quite confronts directly: genuine binational equality cannot be reached through a Jewish national liberation state as the transitional vehicle, because the transition reproduces and entrenches precisely what it is supposed to dissolve. The means are structurally incompatible with the ends. A genuinely equal binational state would require a founding political act that begins from the equal standing of both peoples, not from the prior establishment of Jewish national sovereignty with Arabs accommodated within it afterward. It must be Zionism’s supercession, not Zionism’s completion.

Now, I think you're essentially ignoring one of the core premises of the section on indigeneity: that national liberation temporarily prioritizes indigenous recovery, which may come at some consequent expense to the colonial populace, until such time as the relations that have defined their relationship are abolished through a process of equalization. This is explicit and restated on several occasions. Your analysis is more-or-less correct - to your credit - however you treat Palestinians as an implicit indigenous group relative to Israeli Jews, and I believe that framing is what makes your argument fall flat. Fanon described this phenomenon as "inversion", and warned that out-of-context it could be claimed by outside observers - ignorant of the colony's past - that the decolonial process is itself a form of colonization/oppression against the former colonials. He warned of that false equivalence being used to punish indigenes for their efforts at emancipation, and as an excuse to bolster sympathy and material support for the colonial remnants. He did also warn - as you have more or less described as well - of an incomplete decolonization, in which a national bourgeoisie is able to take power and betray the revolution: I don't disagree with you on that, that sort of counterrevolution is precisely what did end up happening in Israeli society, and stifled the Zionist movement to the point where most of its goals have not been met (or have even actively regressed due to the opposing actions of the Ze'evim).

Neither I nor the Manifesto "ask that Palestinians dissolve their distinct national identity" - rather, that Palestinians as a new group be recognized, equalized, etc., as part of the wider Israeli nation. The point isn't that Palestinians having a unique identity is a problem for Zionism - it isn't, there are millions of Arab Israelis, many of whom identify as Palestinian AND Israeli at the same time - the point is that there needs to be an understanding that ALL peoples of the land belong to it, not only one ethnic group. The matter of political or socioeconomic equity is actually parallel to this, since it is not because Arabs supposedly do not belong that Jews have been prioritized by the Zionist movement - in the same way that the phrase "Black Lives Matter" does not intend to imply that other lives do not - but instead because of the particular emergency and long history of injustice and abuse suffered by Jews, and not by Arabs (a consideration that would also apply if, say, a Native nation in the USA or Canada were to get reterritorialization and statehood and reckon with the sorts of problems that Israel has been faced with). It's true that such priority is indeed a kind of inequality (in the same way that the priority of the workers over the capitalists is also the case in the dictatorship of the proletariat; a highly analogous situation) and if left to stagnate and fester can certainly produce conditions comparable to those of colonial/chauvinist societies (Fanon says it's almost inevitable that if the process of decolonization is left unfinished, the indigenous can reproduce the same tendencies as the colony), and in Israel we do see much of that. But the solution to that travesty is not to declare the indigenous state to now be colonial, or to mischaracterize the revolution as an act of conquest, but to identify the failures and work to renew the revolution and the state along with it.

But if we keep following your theory, then we have to conclude that the historic wrong it was designed to remedy has been substantially corrected. The first stage of Zionism, on your own definition, was the restoration of the Jewish nation to normative existence among nations: an end to statelessness, subalternism and the pariah condition. That has happened. There is a Jewish-majority state where Jewish culture is dominant, where Jewish security is the primary political mandate, where the historic deterritorialization has been reversed. The emergency conditions that justified temporary indigenous priority no longer obtain, at least not in Israel. If there is still genuine work of national liberation to be done for Jews, it is in the diaspora — in fighting for genuine belonging and multinational recognition in Germany, France, the United States. It is not in further entrenching ethnic priority in a state that already functions as a Jewish national home. In fact, your own analogy to the dictatorship of the proletariat makes this conclusion unavoidable: the dictatorship of the proletariat is explicitly transitional, and a Marxist who insists on maintaining it indefinitely after the conditions justifying it had dissolved would be rightly accused of having converted a revolutionary instrument into a tool of permanent domination. The same logic applies here. The structures that legally and materially privilege Jews in Israel, maintained and expanded long past the point of demographic and political security, are no longer instruments of liberation but instruments of dominance, and your own framework has no principled basis for defending them at this stage.

So Zionism has from your own framework become unecessary. But it gets worse : you acknowledge that incomplete decolonization tends to reproduce colonial conditions. But you treat this as an argument for renewing the revolution from within. This position requires you to ignore what the material conditions are actually producing. What they are producing is fascism, not a deformed revolution awaiting renewal. It is fascism, in a recognizable Marxist sense of that word, and the mechanism producing it flows directly from the Zionist legal and ideological architecture you continue to defend.

The Marxist analysis of fascism identifies its social base as the petit-bourgeoisie or more broadly, a working class that has been given a buffer of relative privilege separating it from the most exploited underclass, and which therefore experiences the prospect of genuine equality not as liberation but as an existential threat to its material position. Fascism mobilizes this class fraction not by promising it genuine power over capital, but by promising to maintain and extend its relative dominance over the group below it, through state violence if necessary. It is expansionist because that expansion is the mechanism by which it delivers material rewards to its base without touching bourgeois property relations. It substitutes new land, new resources, new captive labor markets for genuine redistribution.

This is precisely the structure Zionism has built in Israel. The Jewish working class has been given, through decades of Zionist legal and economic architecture, a materially privileged position relative to Arab citizens and Palestinians in the occupied territories. They have better access to land : the Jewish National Fund controls roughly 13% of Israeli land and leases it exclusively to Jews, and the Admissions Committees Law effectively allows hundreds of small communities to exclude Arab residents. They have better access to state development budgets : Arab municipalities receive systematically lower per-capita funding, a gap that has been documented repeatedly and never seriously closed. What this means is that the Jewish worker must rightly fear proletarianization (that is, losing the buffer that separates the Jewish worker from the condition of the Arab underclass) should Arabs be given an equal position. It is the entirely predictable subjective response to an objective material situation that Zionism itself created and maintains.

And we can see this mechanism pushing toward fascism working in real time in Israeli politics. Religious Zionism (Ze’vism, right?) is not a hostile takeover of Zionism by alien forces. It is the political expression of a Jewish working class and lower-middle class, concentrated heavily in the periphery and in the settlement enterprise, whose material interests have been organized by decades of state policy around the maintenance of Jewish ethnic priority. Ben Gvir's base is not the Israeli bourgeoisie, it is Mizrahi working-class communities in development towns and settlers in the West Bank whose economic existence depends on land that was seized from Palestinians. Smotrich has stated openly that there is no Palestinian people and that the land belongs to Jews : this is not ethnonationalism as a deviation from Zionism, it is the logical endpoint of the call to restore the Land to its indigenous people when that call is stripped of the socialist internationalist content that was always the thinnest and most fragile part of the Zionist coalition. These are the mature fruits of a structure that gave one ethnic working class a material stake in the subjugation of another.

And the expansionism, the occupation that you regret, is also operating exactly as the Marxist theory of fascism predicts. The settlement enterprise is not primarily driven by the Israeli bourgeoisie, who would prefer a stable two-state arrangement that allows normal business relations with the region. It is driven by a settler movement whose working-class and lower-middle-class participants are accessing land and housing they could not afford inside the Green Line, subsidized by the state, protected by the military, and ideologically justified by the Zionist claim to the entirety of the historic homeland. This is the classic fascist bargain: the working class gets expansion instead of redistribution. The bourgeoisie gets a compliant nationalist workforce and a state that protects property relations. The bill is paid by the people at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy.

So when you say the solution is to renew the revolution rather than reject it, I need to ask: through what agency, organized how, with what material basis? The actually existing Israeli Jewish working class is not a class straining toward socialist consciousness that has been temporarily misdirected by bad leadership. It is a class whose material interests, as currently constituted by the Zionist legal and economic architecture you continue to defend, are structurally opposed to the equality your endpoint requires. Renewing the revolution would demand that this class act against those interests. There is no organized political force in Israel capable of leading it there, the Israeli left has been electorally marginal for decades (I ask again, how many of the Zionists you interact with on Jumblr are socialists of any form ?). And as I said, the material conditions for its reemergence do not exist, favor fascism and not communism. You are describing a revolution whose social base has been systematically dismantled by the very project you want to renew !

just like in the real Death card