ᜀᜈᜃ᜕ ᜈᜓ ᜋᜌᜍᜒ

Happy new year everyone, wow, 2025 passed so quick, it's almost as if just yesterday we were last year!

How are y'all doing? Hopefully good, last year has been... Something special, many good things happened, many bad things happened, too, But I think we did good so far

We can do better, but that's for this year, for now let's reflect on the last one, we changed a lot didn't we?

Some got new hobbies, some are midway through a new school level, some fell out off bad habits and some are falling in love

This doesn't mean we aren't going through pain, oh no, we have gone through a lot of pain to get here, no? Many are depressed, many are suffering, Some people contemplated continuing with tomorrow, some just wanted to end it all, but still

you're here, reading this, no? I think this takes a lot of strength, which you have, and you prove that you are stronger and stronger with every passing day, because you hope, because you know that there is still more to All of this.

We all changed, some have seen something new, some have found the right words, some have built their courage, some have learned of the beauty of living just because

It's been a long year, but it's only going to get better from here, as long as you truly believe that; if you believe you can make something happen, it will happen

you can click once every 24 hrs to benefit UN aid organizations in Palestine. Arab.org keeps track of these benefits and publishes transparency reports every quarter at their website here. the above link goes directly to benefit Palestine, but you can also click more benefit programs from their frontpage at Arab.org.

a lot of us on tumblr are desperate to help Gaza but have absolutely nothing to offer except our attention and our worry. we don't have money to send, we don't have the ear of the public, we don't have any influence at all. this site appears to be (i say "appears to be" because ive been on the internet and just generally alive too long to ever think anything is a sure bet) a way to summon a small amount of money out of thin air and send it where it needs to go, with zero effort besides moving your mouse or your finger. i think we can all handle that much, no matter how helpless we are otherwise.

i don't like or trust NGOs as a rule, however, UNRWA, the organization aided by clicking the green link above, is despised by Israel and has been defunded by Trump twice, which in my opinion is one of the strongest indicators it is probably actually performing some useful function in Gaza.

I need a break, to not break

Not especially groundbreaking news, but I think this part is interesting:

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

“…. this is…. big.”

“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.” 

“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.” 

“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?” 

“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?” 

“…. this is…. big.”

“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.” 

“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.” 

“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?” 

“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?”