in his own words : “my name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the united states air force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

the whole point of his protest is to highlight the violence and pain that the usa and more specifically the usa army is complicit in. in a way that could not be ignored.

to blur his final moments to make them more 'comfortable' to watch, to consume, is extremely disrespectful.

mind you i am not saying that you should go out of your way to expose yourself to such footage, especially if you are not in a place mentally that allows you to do so.

but his final wish was to force us into a conversation around the pain and violence we are complicit with. so much so that it has now become 'normal' rather than outraging.

it is important that we do not let the media sweep up or minimize his actions (something that the blurring facilitates). just in the last not even four months we have had 3 separate self-immolations in protest against at least two ongoing genocides. this is what the fucking wikipedia page for political self-immolation looks like as of today.

here's some links to check out:

https://www.focuscongo.com/en/

well guess what, its locked behind a $500 a month API to write in because fuck you!

introducing, Not Bionic Reading! it is literally just the bionic reading typefont but for free. god bless neocities

Y'ALL

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you seem nice but this is for the 12 years of my childhood that my gay ass spent attending church 3 days a week. perish bitch

so i know we're all going wild over TumblrPremiumPlus or whatever the fuck but ive made a new discovery about the r//a///yba//n/s scam (or new to me) and since i spent the time i should have been writing up my thesis proposal doing Tumblr Science instead, i have to at least write it down

so my datemate got an IM from someone asking what 'the sunglasses scam' was. That's in quotes bc the specific phrasing will be significant later.

my datemate replies with a message more or less along these lines:

"The sunglasses thing was about a bot that would hack accounts. Once it had access to an account it would make a post about Ray-Ban sunglasses and if you clicked the link in the post it'd hack you too."

Ey hits enter, but the message won't send. Not unusual, we all know that tumblr IM wil just randomly glitch out when it feels like it. So ey hits refresh, and abruptly finds emself on the log-in page.

"Hi! It's time to change your password!" the log-in page says.

My datemate is naturally suspicious about unexpectedly being asked to alter eir password, but, since ey practises basic cybersecurity and actually uses different passwords for every site, ey figures there won't be too much risk. Ey resets eir password, logs back in, and types out the message to eir friend again.

Same thing happens. Message won't send, ey's booted back out to the log-in page, and told to change eir password again. So ey do.

The third time this happens, ey figures something has to be wrong with the message. I've been watching over eir shoulder for a couple of minutes at this point, so we do a bit of Sciencing to work out what the fuck is going on.

Hypothesis: Tumblr IM is, for some reason, flagging mentions of ray-ban.

Experiment: I send various ray-ban related words and phrases to my datemate via IM. If any of them refuse to send and I get kicked out on refreshing, we've found the culprit

Results: "ray-ban" is fine. "sunglasses" goes through no problem. the precise phrase "ray-ban sunglasses" gets me drop-kicked to the log-in page like i was trying to start a fight in a nightclub (or so i assume. ive never actually been out clubbing)

I do a bit of fucking around on text posts with that phrase to see if that achieves the same effect.

I even tried recreating the original scam post as close as i can get without linking to a malicious website.

not a peep. i stay happily logged in.

so.

tumblrs solution to the ray-ban bots issue

was to blacklist the exact phrase "ray-ban sunglasses"

in the IM feature only

making it impossible

to TELL anyone

who uses the goddamn IM feature

about the goddamn scam