some people are responding to this like its a joke and im going to assume u are the type of people to say "its only a 3 minute walk" when i tell them the nearest bench is too far away
a small child came into the café today and asked to buy a chocolate truffle. he tapped a credit card on the reader and it did not go through, mainly because it was not a credit card but in fact a junior cinema pass. i gently explained he couldn't use that to buy things in shops and he looked so gutted that i was like "...but just this once you can have it for free, don't tell my boss though" he said thank you and walked out with his truffle and as he went i heard him chuckling to himself and saying "yes..... yes!!!!!" like the sickos comic
this is what happens when you combine the ingenuity of Italian cuisine with the Jewish preference for desserts that can be made as savory instead of just sweet.
Sephardi and Mizrahi (post-Iberian and Middle Eastern Jews respectively) cuisine has a lot of those characteristics too.
Video transcription: I've seen a lot of comments on my short about Lae'zel dismissing her entire character because she's mean and… I'm just checking in here… you guys know she's scared, right? She's terrified.
She was kidnapped by the worst monster she knows, infected with the most horrifying death anyone in her culture can have, and then stranded on a hostile world, alone, with nothing to guide her except the dogmatic military cult indoctrination of a cruel lich demigod, telling her that her only hope of salvation is to follow Gith doctrine with total unyielding faith.
And still she tries to save you. When she keeps insisting that you must get to the Githyanki crèche, it's our only hope, she's trying to guide you towards the only salvation she knows from the parasite, so she can share it with you. And Gith... aren't supposed to do that, saving an outsider is not part of the doctrine, she's breaking the rules trying to do right by you.
None of that means she's not being an asshole, she's rude, dogmatic and unpleasant. But everything she does comes from a genuine, very misguided and abrasive, desire to do the right thing. It doesn't make her behaviour okay, but there is more to her character than just "being the mean one."
To expand on this a bit more than I can in a 60 second short, people acting from fear and from their damage is a major theme among the Baldur's Gate 3 companions.
Lae'zel is terrified and falling back on the only thing she believes will give her back some control over her situation, which is the dogma of the military cult she's in. Shadowheart is much the same, amnesiac and grasping on to the only solid thing she knows, which is her faith, which preaches deception, loss and duplicity as the only certain factors in life.
Gale is an inveterate people-pleaser desperately dependent on other people to help him feed his magic addiction, with his overtly affable exterior hiding a rolling boulder of guilt, ambition, greed, arrogance and legitimate hurt. Asterion is... well, no way to really lay out his deal without spoiling, but the boy has been through it and his self-destructive, hedonistic and selfish impulses are all coping mechanism and self-defense all the time.
None of that make their shitty behaviours okay, but in a fictional story, those kinds of flaws and toxic behaviours are what make for interesting stories and characters. I don't blame anyone for finding Lae'zel unpleasant and abrasive, but I do get a bit Old Man Yells At Cloud about people who casually brag about shoving her off a cliff-side, or murdering her because "she was a bitch" or whatever.
Like... being unable to face discomfort in your media is not a virtue, and lashing out reactively against fiction that doesn't validate your power fantasy isn't a flex.
Of course, I saw a lot of those reactions in YouTube comments and on social media, so my sample is biased by those algorithms, but still. A lot of people seem aggressively proud that they never engaged with her story because the terrified indoctrinated child-soldier wasn't immediately nice to them and I can't explain it but something about that reaction feels puritan to me.
Whenever a video game has players engaging with fleshed out characters who have motivations and arcs and development independent of the player character you always see this rush of people who can't handle it and actively punish those characters and its..... fascinating.
Especially when we are discussing characters who display mental illness or trauma or realistic reactions to horrific circumstances. The people I have known who didn't have understanding or patience for these characters also *did not have understanding and patience for me*. While some ppl seem to respond to characters as if they expected them to be akin to service workers (existing to make sure you are having fun and comfortable and your food comes out hot and quick) and just don't seem to know how to react to anything else, it's troubling how often people miss the opportunity to practice empathy in fictional stories.
This is really what we see when ppl ask for media to have more nuanced characters or mentally ill ones or what have you, and then when those characters do not reinforce a worldview or otherwise immediately offer comfort to the consumer, they get tossed in the fire.
Something something about people centering their own experience and perspective as the singular one and being unable to shift from it even for one second in a fantasy video game.
an ex-zionist jewish man recently went a bit viral on tiktok for sharing exactly how he sees zionism tie israel to the jewish identity and his personal experience with breaking away from it - I think it’s a really great watch.
He also made a follow up talking specifically about how he learned to humanise Palestinians, and a really integral part of it was his school, which would often bring in Palestinian speakers who’d share their perspective (here’s a link to it).
Israel has started putting out loads of "evidence" that the Hamas headquarters are below the Al-Shifa hospital.
Their "evidence" is a CGI video that they made themselves showing the whole hospital and then zooming in and going below ground to show a sprawling, multi-level "headquarters" with little CGI-people with guns roaming around on metal platforms and such. Here's the link to Netan-fuck-you's twitter, and the video. 50/50 odds on it vanishing within 24 hours, so if anyone wants to embed the video into a reblog of this post in order to preserve it in all its bullshit glory, please do.
Their second piece of evidence is a phone call recording where the two people are "overheard" saying THEE most obvious script I've ever heard in my life, which basically amounts to "Well you know how the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "The headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "Yeah, the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital." It's literally that badly done. I can't now find the video of it, but if someone has it, pls link it. The version I saw was shared by SkyNews (🤮)
Make no mistake. This is israel getting ahead of the global narrative. This is Israel justifying their bombing of a hospital before they do it.
They bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, and the world responded with an enormous wave of outrage and recriminations, so Israel immediately tried to claim that Hamas did it, and then they said that actually no, it was Palestinian Jihadists (who don't even operate out of Gaza; they're all based in the West Bank).
They know full well that if they bombed another hospital, they wouldn't be able to claim it was Hamas/PJ.
So now they're laying all this groundwork, disseminating blatantly falsified "evidence" of a sprawling secret terrorist bunker hidden beneath the main hospital in Gaza, where its estimated that 50,000 people are sheltering.
If Al-Shifa hospital is still standing by this time tomorrow, I will be shocked.
Israel is laying the groundwork now so that when they level the hospital and kill every single person inside it, the public will justify it for them. "Yeah but Hamas had a huge headquarters underneath," the public will say. "It's not Israel's fault that Hamas hiding underneath hospitals," they'll say. "Israel's just trying to root out Hamas! It's awful that so many civilians died, but that's what happens when terrorists use civilians as shields" they'll say, as though killing a human shield in order to get to the bad guy is acceptable literally anywhere in the world, much less when the "shields" amount to well over 7,000 civilians.
Do not fall for the propaganda. Do not allow Israel to bomb another hospital without forcing them to fave the backlash for it (even if they didn't do Al-Ahli, they've attacked hospitals and health centres repeatedly in the past). Do not let your country's politicians justify the slaughter of a hospital full of civilians just to get at the (alleged!!) terrorist base below. Do not let your colleagues or friends or family justify the razing of a hospital full of innocent men, women, and children.
We can't do much to stop them, but by fuck can we do everything in our power to make sure they don't get away with it.
[Image IDs: the first is a tweet by Netanyahu, saying Hamas-ISIS is sick. They turn hospitals into headquarters for their terror. We just released intelligence proving it." This is followed by a video, which the at the time of the screenshot was showing a CGI version of the hospital. Image 2 is the same, but the video was screenshotted as it shows the CGI "lair" of hamas that's allegedly below the hospital; a multi-storey industrial-looking space with armed soldiers walking along suspended platforms. Image three is a tweet by @HenMazzig that says "BREAKING: it's now confirmed that Hamas's operational headquarters is stationed below the Al Shifa hospital - Gaza's main hospital." This is followed by an image screenshotted from Netanyahu's bullshit video, this time showing an aerial shot of the hospital amidst the debris of the almost completely destroyed neighbouring suburb.]
I accidentally hit the poll button and now it won't let me get rid of it or publish this post until I've filled it in, so: is bombing a hospital utterly reprehensible, unforgivable, and unjustifiable?
Hey guys, there are eleven votes on the poll, but only two reblogs thus far. With tmblr actively suppressing any posts that have to do with the situation in Gaza, reblogs are imperative; it's the only way to spread word, since the main tags are all being hobbled. Please reblog this. 50,000 civilians sheltering at the hospital, and Israel is almost certainly gonna bomb it - if they haven't already - and they're gonna claim it was justified.
Please help fight that narrative, and reblog this.
Massive fuck you to everyone who is talking about Palestinians as if we’re already all dead and sharing more solidarity with our corpses than us living. “We will never forget the beautiful Palestinian people-“ how about you stop “making peace” with Palestinian extermination. My people are not going to be forgotten because we are going to live. Palestinians have already survived one genocide and have been surviving one ever since.
Do not ever let the idea that all Palestinians are going to die exist in your mind. Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
animentality
officialspec
beaft
lowcountry-gothic
blueapplesiren
doctorbluesmanreturns
missbirdseyeof1950
fancynewaddress
mariacallous
marivenah
ohnoitstbskyen
rifa
i-am-a-fish
pokemonheritageposts
stil-lindigo
bundibird
palipunk
nickyandmikey
irrelevantlyvalid
chokolattejedi
executeness
ramshacklefey
jbbartram-illu
eregyrn-falls
ember-knights