writerwithoundsound

I write to you with a heavy heart 💔 My children and I are going through very difficult times, and no one is asking about us. My son needs treatment and medication, and he needs milk, diapers, and urgent care. Please don't leave us alone in these difficult circumstances. 😔

We need your help. The situation is extremely difficult. You are our last hope. Food, clothes, milk, rent—everything has become incredibly expensive. My son, Ahmed, needs heart surgery and eye surgery. Please help my son so he can complete his treatment and undergo the operations. In addition to my family in Gaza, my parents, brothers, and sisters are also living in dire circumstances. Please help me for the sake of my family.

My name is Sharif, and I suffer from a back injury. I need intensive treatment and physical therapy to recover. Unfortunately, we lost everything in Gaza; we have no income and cannot work. The situation is extremely difficult.

PLEASE HELP 🙏🏽 EVEN A SIMPLE REPOST AND COMMENTING CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

https://www.tumblr.com/90-ghost/768348012370100224?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/nabulsi/777393943645208576?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/sar-soor/800243879780761600?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/a-shade-of-blue/777485404670656512/this-fundraiser-has-been-shared-by-nabulsi?source=share

Ahmed is suffering greatly. His condition is worsening because I can't afford his surgery; I keep postponing it. Every post I ignore means an extra hour of pain. Please donate; your help could save his life.

Please, my mother is in the hospital and urgently needs medical treatment and healthy food for her recovery. Please, I don't want to lose her. Even a small donation would help—and please share this post. 🥲

#ThinkOfTheChildren

#GazaDonation

#Urgent

#BeAHumanitarian

#JehovahGodWillSaveGaza

#Donations

#StopIgnoringGaza

#AntiIsraelOccupation

Sharif and his family need URGENT HELP

His son Ahmed is suffering from a heart condition and damage to his eye, his mother's leg is badly injured, and Sharif himself is suffering from an extreme back injury.

They need funds for IMMEDIATE TREATMENT for all of them, but so far they have only raised €122/20,000 of their goal. Barely a fraction of what they need.

Please ACT QUICKLY and help this family get the treatment they need.

*and people who enjoy other indie stuff like games and animation and webcomics and whatever but like. We’re all the same category of fans tbh and I gotta cut it out because i’d honestly rather have people to talk to than have the nichest fandom like why would you want that you don’t know anyone who can share your joy for the media.

so, with my excellent taste in fiction podcasts, I’m giving back to the community here are some completely underrated shows more people should be talking about (in no particular order, im just looking at my podcast list):

imma highlight the ones that I think are the most underrated, like half of these there are at least a few other people who talk about it on here, but the others it seems like no one knows about it except me sometimes and its like. Go listen to it right this instant. Really you should listen to all of these but yeah.

Witherburn After School News

Neighbourly

Death by Dying

Leaving Corvat

The Dead Letter Office of Somewhere, Ohio

Nowhere, On Air

The Author’s Anathema

On leaving home for the first time:

Leaving Home before 18: A Practical Guide for Cast-Offs, Runaways, and Everybody in Between 

Ask the Bitches: “I Just Turned 18 and My Parents Are Kicking Me Out. How Do I Brace Myself?” 

Ask the Bitches: I Want to Move Out, but I Can’t Afford It. How Bad Would It Be to Take out Student Loans to Cover It?

How To Start at Rock Bottom: Welfare Programs and the Social Safety Net 

Advice I Wish My Parents Gave Me When I Was 16 

Ask the Bitches: How Can I Make Myself Financially Secure Before Age 30? 

You Won’t Regret Your Frugal 20s 

Master the Logistics and Etiquette of Moving Out 

Season 2, Episode 5: “What Do I Need to Know about Moving into My First Apartment?” 

On basic finance:

How the Hell Does One Open a Bank Account? Asking for a Friend. 

How Do You Write and Cash Checks? Asking for a Friend. 

Budgets Don’t Work for Everyone—Try the Spending Tracker System Instead

You Must Be This Big to Be an Emergency Fund 

A Hand-Holding Guide to Getting Your First Credit Card 

How to File Your Taxes FOR FREE: Simple Instructions for the Stressed-Out Taxpayer

Dafuq Is Credit and How Do You Bend It to Your Will? 

How to Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

Dafuq Is Interest and How Does It Work for the Forces of Darkness? 

What’s the Difference Between Savings and Checking Accounts, and How Should I Be Using Them?

Dafuq Is a Down Payment? And Why Do You Need One to Buy Stuff?

Dafuq Is Insurance and Why Do You Even Need It? 

Investing Deathmatch: Investing in the Stock Market vs. Just… Not 

Dafuq Is a Retirement Plan and Why Do You Need One?

Do NOT Make This Disastrous Beginner Mistake With Your Retirement Funds

On managing your household:

How the Hell Does One Laundry? Asking for a Friend. 

How the Hell Does One Wash Dishes? Asking for a Friend. 

Ask the Bitches: Why Are Painted Mason Jars the Internet’s Only Solution to My Tiny Apartment Woes? 

9 Essential Tools for Apartment-Dwellers (and 6 That Are Kinda Useless)

Ask the Bitches: How Can I Survive in an Apartment with No Heat? 

How to Save Money on Your Beloved Pets 

Bullshit Reasons Not to Buy a House: Refuted 

How To Maintain Your Car When You’re Barely Driving It

25 Tricks to Stay Cool WITHOUT Air Conditioning 

On feeding and caring for yourself:

You Should Learn To Cook. Here’s Why.

How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss 

If You Don’t Eat Leftovers I Don’t Even Want to Know You 

I Think I Need to Go the Emergency Room?

Ask the Bitches: Ugh, How Do I Build the Habit of Taking Meds?

On maintaining relationships:

Season 1, Episode 8: “My Mother Demands Information About My One-Night Stands.” 

Season 1, Episode 3: “My Parents Have Bad Credit. Should I Help by Co-signing Their Mortgage?” 

Ask the Bitches: How Do I Say “No” When a Loved One Asks for Money… Again? 

Ask the Bitches: My Dad Sucks with Money. How Do I Make Him Change? 

You Need to Talk to Your Parents About Their Retirement Plan

Season 2, Episode 1: “I’m Financially Stable, but My Friends Aren’t. The Guilt Is Crushing!”  

On starting your career:

22-Year-Olds Don’t Belong in Grad School 

High School Students Have No Way of Knowing What Career to Choose. Why Do We Make Them Do It Anyway? 

The Actually Helpful, Nuanced, Non-Bullshit Way to Choose a Future Career

Your College Major May Not Prepare You for Your Job—but It Can Prepare You for Life 

The Ugly Truth About Unpaid Internships 

People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.

There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.

The rise of overly dark Magical Girl shows, which contain suffering for no other purpose than to display said suffering, largely stems from a complete misunderstanding of what Madoka was, and what made it great.

Madoka spends two and a half episodes setting up a happy, cheerful, Magical Girl show, and then spends eight and a half episodes rejecting that premise, showing that hope only leads to despair, that a wish will lead to a curse, that things cannot fundamentally improve, and that trying to make things better will only bring suffering upon yourself and others. This is what derivative "tragical girl" shows were about; the suffering of young women for its own sake, as if that was the point of Madoka, as if the suffering was the entire point.

The last episode, however, has Madoka herself rejecting the show's entire premise. She's told hope leads to despair, and exclaims "If someone says it's wrong to have hope, I will tell them they're wrong every single time.". She's told that the very foundation of the universe leads to suffering being inherent, constant, and that the only thing one can do is to endure said suffering as long as one can bear, before falling to despair and inflicting the suffering one has experienced unto others; she's told that any wish will become a curse, yet ends the show saying "All those Magical Girls who held onto their hopes and fought against witches, I don't want to see them cry—I want them to stay smiling until the end. If any rule or law stands in my way, I will destroy it. I will rewrite it. That is my wish, that is my prayer.""

Walpurgisnacht had been set up as the most terrible witch to ever exist up until that point, and the viewer had been led to believe they'd fight to the death against it, and inevitably lose—as a Magical Girl seemingly always does in the Madoka universe. Madoka does not fight her, Madoka shows compassion, simply stating "It's okay. It's okay now, you don't have to hate anyone anymore, you don't have to curse anyone anymore. I'll go back, before you took that form, and shoulder that burden for you". There was no fight, and Madoka simply took on her despair, as she took on everyone else's, allowing them to once again have hope.

"kink," contrary to what a lot of internet-only kinksters seem to think, is not referencing your relationship to a concept--it's referencing the concept itself. for example, "bondage" in this context is not referring to "being turned on by tying someone up/being tied up," it's referring to the concept of being tied up/tying someone up itself. this is one of the most common kinks you'll see people playing with in entirely nonsexual contexts--most rope groups have at least a handful of players who are asexual or entirely sex-repulsed, for example. at a lot of rope play sessions, sexual activity will be banned entirely & you'll generally be expected to not show signs of sexual arousal while in that space. because it's not the space for that--sexual play parties are their own thing.

so what makes something a kink vs. a "normal" interest, if it's not a sexual aspect? mostly social stigma. the group of interests considered "kinks" have developed a shared umbrella due to a shared societal pathologization of those interests in similar ways, and one of the ways that pathology manifests is by considering those interests fundamentally sexual. there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a sexual dimension to your kink, to be clear--but society sees sex as inherently disgusting, and sexualization is frequently weaponized to pathologize all kinds of people.

portraying interest in domination/submission as inherently sexual, for example, means those explicitly navigating consensual d/s play are relegated to the realm of "the bedroom" and signifiers of their relationship (i.e. a collar) are considered "obscene" and not fit to exist in public--even when equivalent signifiers of vanilla lifestyles are allowed and not considered obscene, i.e. a wedding ring. if you portray an interest in roleplaying as a dog as inherently sexual, it means anyone roleplaying as a dog in public is subjecting the public to nasty, perverted sex, it can be classified as obscene, you can arrest people for barking and wearing leashes even if they are deriving zero sexual pleasure from it whatsoever and are not exposing themselves or harassing anyone.

why are most kinks expressed sexually to some degree, or have a sexual dimension to them? because sexually active adults tend to enjoy sex. i don't know how else to explain this, genuinely. if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal and sexual attraction, then you will often be aroused by your interests in a sexual context.

like, i am really into fandom. i love a lot of different things about fandom. one of the things i love about fandom is that it's horny; i'm a big enthusiast of smut, horny cosplay, et cetera and so on. but that doesn't mean that i don't like fandom in completely non-horny contexts, or that my interest in fandom is always sexual and can never be separated from sex. just because i cosplay erotically doesn't mean that i don't also cosplay in other contexts entirely. cosplay turns me on, and i also love cosplaying at conventions and for entirely non-horny reasons.

kink is the same. sometimes the exact same person is both turned on by petplay and interested in it nonsexually. this is actually like... really common, it's not even just "sometimes," i would say it applies to the vast majority of IRL kinksters active in my local scene, and i would hazard a guess that this isn't a major outlier, it's fairly common in scenes across the world. but if you can understand "i like cosplaying, and sometimes i'll cosplay at a convention, and sometimes i'll cosplay for sex, and sometimes i'll cosplay for fun alone in my room, and sometimes i'll cosplay to jack off, and sometimes i'll cosplay for money, and none of these are The Only Reason I Like Cosplay, and sometimes when i cosplay i will do it in a way that only includes some of these reasons and not the others at all," it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same reasoning to kink.

'Recycling'

I understand why you may have come to this conclusion, but this is a pretty misguided take at best and making the problem worse at worst. The problem with the al Ghuls is not that they are villainous, powerful, or dangerous, it is that they are flattened and unchanging, unable to be given evolution, depth, or an interiority independent of a western viewer who brings them to life with his viewership. This, not base negativity, is the foundation of Said's Orientalism as scholarly critique:

In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region. But Orientalism has taken a further step than that: it views the Orient as something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. [...] The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior. [...] The Oriental is given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, in need even of knowledge about himself. No dialectic is either desired or allowed. There is a source of information (the Oriental) and a source of knowledge (the Orientalist), in short, a writer and a subject matter otherwise inert. The relationship between the two is radically a matter of power [...]

Orientalism happens in the distortion, generalisation, and instrumentalisation of that material for a Western gaze, not in the mere fact of a Western person writing about Asia or Asians at all, even villainous ones. There is obviously a certain amount of it that is inescapable; Orientalism in the pop culture is derived from the authority of scholarship which, uh, DC Comics will very obviously be unable to hold a candle to. You will never get revolutionary or liberatory writing from this company or characters. Nor can these characters ever be detached from their history or the history of the man who created them or the history of their inspirations and their creators, and so on and so forth. So that's the baseline.

But even working within that somewhat defeatist attitude, I think the above proposal in a reboot is far bleaker and dehumanizing than my own realism-ideal scenario, which is as simple as Make The Al Ghuls Complex People With Their Own Emotional Histories & Perspectives. Ra's can dangle Bruce chained up above a pit of lava (see also: the eroticism of Ra's al Ghul) for all I care as long as I understand how and why we got there and Ra's doesn't feel like a caricature. I am a reader; I like danger and mystique and power in my fiction! Danger and mystique and power is not the enemy, essentialisation is! The Asian man can be a despot because he individually is a despot, not because Asians are predisposed to despotism; to duck this truth due to a fear of the difficulties of clarification makes it sound like you're afraid of the ghost of Karl Wittfogel. The Orientalist levers we see in the depiction of the al Ghuls are writing choices that are independently fixable.

To take the League of Assassins and give it to Henri Ducard or David Cain or Slade Wilson or whomever has not de-Orientalised the story, but rather it states that only a European hand can safely (or rather, without discomfort) hold that power, while the Asians get flattened (again!) and stripped of their power for the sake of narrative rehabilitation (and again, comfort on the part of the audience). Not to mention that without fundamentally changing core components of what the League is but now denying it the possibility of evolution and depth in accordance with its leader, it still has its roots in Orientalist exoticism. The Orient still supplies the danger and mystery, it's just been outsourced to a white proxy so the reader doesn't have to feel bad about who's wielding it.

The bigger issue than the League, though, to me, is the framing of what is left for the al Ghuls. Asianness, Arabness, and the Oriental is only allowed clemency and legitimacy when they have been de-fanged and divested of, to be frank, anything interesting in their story. To deny Ra's his ideology and to deny Talia of her central conflict--what is left? "A completely ordinary civilian family of Arab immigrants"--why? Why is the only safe way to depict brown people smallness, innocence, mundanity? Why are they immigrants; is it so inconceivable that world traveler, billionaire, and superhero Bruce Wayne could fall in love in Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait? Don't think that this is any different from the idea that the West can 'tame' and 'civilize' through its influence.

Why does ambition and grandeur and mysticism taint Asians so uniquely and thoroughly that we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, while, say, the innate conservatism of Bruce's character as billionaire patriarch and hero stamping out a 'criminal parasite', while an obvious myth that flatters Anglo-American capital's right to rule against a failing state and assertion of moral order, allowed to be complicated, subverted, and redefined? Denying the al Ghuls that same grace is a failing, not a fix. It just shuffles the discomfort and asserts a kind of condescension, a lack of belief that a reader can identify the distinction between "Arab characters can be complex, powerful, and even antagonistic" and "Arabs are a sinister race".

In short: