You Know I'm Something Of A Civil Engineer Myself

So, I recently learned about the “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media that has helped Iranians sentenced to die by the regime in the past.

I am now asking you guys for help with that again.

There is an Iranian Jew named Arvin Netanel ben Siona, whose execution date is set for this Saturday. The Iranian Jewish community have tried endlessly to pursue his release, but to no avail.

vinnews.com

REPORT: Jewish Man Scheduled to Be Executed by Iran on Shabbos - VINnews

IRAN (VINnews) — A twenty year-old Jewish man is tragically scheduled to be executed by Iranian authorities on Shabbos, according to Iranian

Please spread his name.

Please help me. I have nothing else.

I’m still educating myself on the history of Israel and Palestine, but it seems to me that the main reason that people on the left are so in favor of a Palestinian state and not an Israeli state is because of the widely accepted narrative of Israelis being “the white colonizers” in this situation. If this assessment is correct, I think it exposes part of the problem with how willfully the left has accepted the idea of white people being colonizing bad guys. I don’t want to minimize white European’s legacy of imperialism of course, I believe dismantling that legacy should be done with care and a strong foundation in factual reality, because leftists have learned to hate the white settler, and that seems to be all fine and good until suddenly all it takes to dupe those leftists into anti-Jewish behavior is to convince them that Jewish people are white settlers. It seems that, in a movement aiming to combat hate, prejudice towards ANY group, even if it would appear to be punching up, acts as a blind spot through which they can find themselves acting prejudiced towards a historically down-trodden people.

The problem with antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Someone recently reblogged this post I shared that called out antisemitism in pro-Palestinian rallies. An action I was initially happy about, until I went into this person's blog, and saw a lot of posts that I, as an Israeli-Jewish person, find incredibly antisemitic. I found myself utterly baffled by that. Because this person clearly recognized the things said in these rallies were extremely antisemitic, and yet, they posted a lot of things that were rooted in the same antisemitic worldview. Can't they see it? And I think the main problem with the current pro-Palestinian movement is that they honestly can't see the line between being on the side of compassion and humanity and being critical of Israel's actions, to spreading horrible lies and dehumanizing Israelis and Jewish people. And the ugly truth these people refuse to face is that the reason they can't see when they cross this line is probably unconscious antisemitism.

You don't need to hate Jewish people to be antisemitic

Antisemitism, like many other forms of racism, often works on an unconscious level. Maybe you have Jewish friends. Maybe you fought for better Jewish representation in media. Maybe you are even Jewish yourself. But over the years you have been exposed to a lot of antisemitic ideas and stereotypes that altered your worldview and made you more vulnerable to believing Jewish people are the bad guys.

If your gut reaction to this is- "but Israel is actually doing bad things, so I'm actually right about hating them." Please keep reading.

Your idea of Israel and what it stands for is based on the worldview of the most radical right-wing Israeli activists at best, and blatant lies at worst.

Imagine if we took the words of the most radical Republicans out there, the ones that go after trans kids and believe women should have no right over their own bodies, and believe all Americans are supporting this idea. That wouldn't have been very fair of us, right? Because there are a lot of people in America who are fighting for a better future. A lot of people who are standing up for human rights.

Just like the United States isn't a homogeneous entity, filled with only trump supporters, Israel is also an incredibly diverse place, with people who have radically different ideas about how Israel should look. Even the current Israeli government, which is extremely right-wing, and has people in it I personally believe should have never been in a position of power, is probably a lot less evil than you were led to believe by ill-intent strangers on the internet. Mainly because this is still a democratic government, in a democratic country, which has a lot of checks and balances that (for the most part) manage to prevent people with radical ideas from making them into official policies.

I don't blame you for believing the reports you see from Gaza. As a pacifist, and as someone who voted for left-wing parties ever since I was eligible to vote, someone who truly believes the Palestinians has a right to self-determination and sees how problematic the occupation is, I struggle a lot when I see posts about the suffering of the people in Gaza. Wars are horrible. I never want to see other people suffer. Let alone children. I wish I could go there right now and take all of them somewhere safe. I wish none of this was happening.

But I also know who my people are, and the values they stand for. And what I noticed about these anti-zionist posts is that they are often written in a biased, misleading way. They often attribute malicious intentions to Israel's actions. And they often jump to conclusions, without giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. Without asking the right questions. And often, without any sort of proof. Some of these posts are outrageous lies. Others are incredibly biased and fail to mention the terrorist organization Israel is fighting against.

Only a small amount of them are coming from unbiased sources that describe the reality of the situation without giving in to personal interpretation.

But most of you can't tell the difference. You are seeing lies about how IDF soldiers are targeting children, or about how Israel is lying about their true evil intentions, and you accept them as the truth, without questioning the intention of the person who wrote that post. Without stopping to think this is incredibly dehumanizing to think Israeli people are capable of such monstrous actions. Without examining your own biases. And that's incredibly problematic, and yes, this is antisemitic. Because you would have never spread this kind of accusation about any other group of people without definitive proof.

This isn't to say our soldiers are never wrong, and that there aren't any bad apples, or even systematic problems in the IDF and every allegation should be thoroughly investigated, because any harm to innocent people is terrible, unavoidable as it may be. And ideally, even terrorists should get a fair trial.

But if you think soldiers in Israel defense forces, who are mostly 18-21-year-old Jewish men and women from all sides of the political spectrum, are inherently evil and baby killers, you are in fact antisemitic.

Even if you believe your type of anti Zionism isn't antisemitism being anti-zionist is still not a great position to take.

I never defined myself as a zionist before. But it was more to do with my own disconnection with Judaism and my ideas about the place of religion in modern society than my belief about the right of Israel to exist.

I think it would be amazing to live in a utopian world where we have one multicultural democratic state where everyone lives together in harmony. But I’m also a realistic person. And someone who wants to keep living as a free woman with full rights in my home country.

And while I never felt particularly zionist, I was never an anti-zionist, and I never believed zionist was a bad word.

I'm probably not the first person who tells you this, but Zionist isn't a synonym for "everything I hate about Israel". It doesn't mean "a person who supports the occupation", or even "a person who only cares about the life of Israelis" or "someone who fully supports the Israeli government".

So what does it actually say? Let's look at a dictionary definition.

Do you notice what the definition doesn't say? Anything about Israel's borders or about the idea of a Palestinian state. There are many types of Zionism, some more radical than others. But as I said before, is it really fair to judge an entire group of people based on the idea of the most radical of them?

The truth is, most of us just want to live in peace. We want to go to work without finding ourselves at the scene of a terror attack or running to the shelter because of rockets. We want all the hostages to come home. We want to feel safe in our own homes. This is what it means to be a zionist. This is what you are standing up against. Not the "occupation," or the "settlers" or the extremists in the government. Just regular people who want to live their lives.

Zionism isn't colonialism

Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. This was the land we dreamed of in 2000 years of exile, and it's a huge part of our religion and our culture. This doesn't mean the Palestinians don't have a claim to the land as well after living on it for so many years, or that what they went through in 1948 wasn't terrible, but it doesn't magically make Israelis into white colonialists who woke up one day and decided to take over a random land.

A lot of mistakes were made. In 1948, and especially in 1967. And we are paying for them now. But the idea that Israel is a colonialist state that represents everything that's wrong with society is entirely false.

If you support the existence of a Palestinian state but don't believe Israel deserves the same right, you need to ask yourself why that is the case.

Is that because you don't believe Jewish people when they tell you about their connection to the land of Israel? Because you think there is something inherently wrong with the existence of a state that is only for Jewish people? (But have no problem with all the Muslim and Christian states out there) Because you think Palestinian deserves to live from the river to the sea and Israelis should have nothing, or whatever the Palestinians would be willing to give them? Because you are more comfortable with the idea of Jewish people as a minority in a Palestinian Muslim state than the idea of them having their own free country? Because you think you know better than us what our future should look like?

Because all of these reasons are antisemitic.

Rei Faraday

i'm honestly still kind of floored by how well these characters line up with one another.

"ai is making it so everyone can make art" Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity

This is for the support of Gaza's Municipality Services - which help ensure clean drinking water, waste collection, debri removal and sanitation services - life saving services to run a state - reader I imagine wherever you are or how lacking the municipality services in your city is, it's not worse than Ghazza.

Currently it's only at 11% - please donate -

gaza-city.ensany.com

Life For Gaza

Life For GazaDrinking Water, Waste Collection, Debris Removal, and Sanitation Services for the Residents of Gaza City - Gaza Municipality

How I learned to write smarter, not harder

(aka, how to write when you're hella ADHD lol)

A reader commented on my current long fic asking how I write so well. I replied with an essay of my honestly pretty non-standard writing advice (that they probably didn't actually want lol) Now I'm gonna share it with you guys and hopefully there's a few of you out there who will benefit from my past mistakes and find some useful advice in here. XD Since I started doing this stuff, which are all pretty easy changes to absorb into your process if you want to try them, I now almost never get writer's block.

The text of the original reply is indented, and I've added some additional commentary to expand upon and clarify some of the concepts.

As for writing well, I usually attribute it to the fact that I spent roughly four years in my late teens/early 20s writing text roleplay with a friend for hours every single day. Aside from the constant practice that provided, having a live audience immediately reacting to everything I wrote made me think a lot about how to make as many sentences as possible have maximum impact so that I could get that kind of fun reaction. (Which is another reason why comments like yours are so valuable to fanfic writers! <3) The other factors that have improved my writing are thus: 1. Writing nonlinearly. I used to write a whole story in order, from the first sentence onward. If there was a part I was excited to write, I slogged through everything to get there, thinking that it would be my reward once I finished everything that led up to that. It never worked. XD It was miserable. By the time I got to the part I wanted to write, I had beaten the scene to death in my head imagining all the ways I could write it, and it a) no longer interested me and b) could not live up to my expectations because I couldn't remember all my ideas I'd had for writing it. The scene came out mediocre and so did everything leading up to it. Since then, I learned through working on VN writing (I co-own a game studio and we have some visual novels that I write for) that I don't have to write linearly. If I'm inspired to write a scene, I just write it immediately. It usually comes out pretty good even in a first draft! But then I also have it for if I get more ideas for that scene later, and I can just edit them in. The scenes come out MUCH stronger because of this. And you know what else I discovered? Those scenes I slogged through before weren't scenes I had no inspiration for, I just didn't have any inspiration for them in that moment! I can't tell you how many times there was a scene I had no interest in writing, and then a week later I'd get struck by the perfect inspiration for it! Those are scenes I would have done a very mediocre job on, and now they can be some of the most powerful scenes because I gave them time to marinate. Inspiration isn't always linear, so writing doesn't have to be either!

Some people are the type that joyfully write linearly. I have a friend like this--she picks up the characters and just continues playing out the next scene. Her story progresses through the entire day-by-day lives of the characters; it never timeskips more than a few hours. She started writing and posting just eight months ago, she's about an eighth of the way through her planned fic timeline, and the content she has so far posted to AO3 for it is already 450,000 words long. But most of us are normal humans. We're not, for the most part, wired to create linearly. We consume linearly, we experience linearly, so we assume we must also create linearly. But actually, a lot of us really suffer from trying to force ourselves to create this way, and we might not even realize it. If you're the kind of person who thinks you need to carrot-on-a-stick yourself into writing by saving the fun part for when you finally write everything that happens before it: Stop. You're probably not a linear writer. You're making yourself suffer for no reason and your writing is probably suffering for it. At least give nonlinear writing a try before you assume you can't write if you're not baiting or forcing yourself into it!! Remember: Writing is fun. You do this because it's fun, because it's your hobby. If you're miserable 80% of the time you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong!

2. Rereading my own work. I used to hate reading my own work. I wouldn't even edit it usually. I would write it and slap it online and try not to look at it again. XD Writing nonlinearly forced me to start rereading because I needed to make sure scenes connected together naturally and it also made it easier to get into the headspace of the story to keep writing and fill in the blanks and get new inspiration. Doing this built the editing process into my writing process--I would read a scene to get back in the headspace, dislike what I had written, and just clean it up on the fly. I still never ever sit down to 'edit' my work. I just reread it to prep for writing and it ends up editing itself. Many many scenes in this fic I have read probably a dozen times or more! (And now, I can actually reread my own work for enjoyment!) Another thing I found from doing this that it became easy to see patterns and themes in my work and strengthen them. Foreshadowing became easy. Setting up for jokes or plot points became easy. I didn't have to plan out my story in advance or write an outline, because the scenes themselves because a sort of living outline on their own. (Yes, despite all the foreshadowing and recurring thematic elements and secret hidden meanings sprinkled throughout this story, it actually never had an outline or a plan for any of that. It's all a natural byproduct of writing nonlinearly and rereading.)

Unpopular writing opinion time: You don't need to make a detailed outline.

Some people thrive on having an outline and planning out every detail before they sit down to write. But I know for a lot of us, we don't know how to write an outline or how to use it once we've written it. The idea of making one is daunting, and the advice that it's the only way to write or beat writer's block is demoralizing. So let me explain how I approach "outlining" which isn't really outlining at all.

I write in a Notion table, where every scene is a separate table entry and the scene is written in the page inside that entry. I do this because it makes writing nonlinearly VASTLY more intuitive and straightforward than writing in a single document. (If you're familiar with Notion, this probably makes perfect sense to you. If you're not, imagine something a little like a more contained Google Sheets, but every row has a title cell that opens into a unique Google Doc when you click on it. And it's not as slow and clunky as the Google suite lol) (Edit from the future: I answered an ask with more explanation on how I use Notion for non-linear writing here.) When I sit down to begin a new fic idea, I make a quick entry in the table for every scene I already know I'll want or need, with the entries titled with a couple words or a sentence that describes what will be in that scene so I'll remember it later. Basically, it's the most absolute bare-bones skeleton of what I vaguely know will probably happen in the story.

Then I start writing, wherever I want in the list. As I write, ideas for new scenes and new connections and themes will emerge over time, and I'll just slot them in between the original entries wherever they naturally fit, rearranging as necessary, so that I won't forget about them later when I'm ready to write them. As an example, my current long fic started with a list of roughly 35 scenes that I knew I wanted or needed, for a fic that will probably be around 100k words (which I didn't know at the time haha). As of this writing, it has expanded to 129 scenes. And since I write them directly in the page entries for the table, the fic is actually its own outline, without any additional effort on my part. As I said in the comment reply--a living outline!

This also made it easier to let go of the notion that I had to write something exactly right the first time. (People always say you should do this, but how many of us do? It's harder than it sounds! I didn't want to commit to editing later! I didn't want to reread my work! XD) I know I'm going to edit it naturally anyway, so I can feel okay giving myself permission to just write it approximately right and I can fix it later. And what I found from that was that sometimes what I believed was kind of meh when I wrote it was actually totally fine when I read it later! Sometimes the internal critic is actually wrong. 3. Marinating in the headspace of the story. For the first two months I worked on [fic], I did not consume any media other than [fandom the fic is in]. I didn't watch, read, or play anything else. Not even mobile games. (And there wasn't really much fan content for [fandom] to consume either. Still isn't, really. XD) This basically forced me to treat writing my story as my only source of entertainment, and kept me from getting distracted or inspired to write other ideas and abandon this one.

As an aside, I don't think this is a necessary step for writing, but if you really want to be productive in a short burst, I do highly recommend going on a media consumption hiatus. Not forever, obviously! Consuming media is a valuable tool for new inspiration, and reading other's work (both good and bad, as long as you think critically to identify the differences!) is an invaluable resource for improving your writing.

When I write, I usually lay down, close my eyes, and play the scene I'm interested in writing in my head. I even take a ten-minute nap now and then during this process. (I find being in a state of partial drowsiness, but not outright sleepiness, makes writing easier and better. Sleep helps the brain process and make connections!) Then I roll over to the laptop next to me and type up whatever I felt like worked for the scene. This may mean I write half a sentence at a time between intervals of closed-eye-time XD

People always say if you're stuck, you need to outline.

What they actually mean by that (whether they realize it or not) is that if you're stuck, you need to brainstorm. You need to marinate. You don't need to plan what you're doing, you just need to give yourself time to think about it!

What's another framing for brainstorming for your fic? Fantasizing about it! Planning is work, but fantasizing isn't.

You're already fantasizing about it, right? That's why you're writing it. Just direct that effort toward the scenes you're trying to write next! Close your eyes, lay back, and fantasize what the characters do and how they react.

And then quickly note down your inspirations so you don't forget, haha.

And if a scene is so boring to you that even fantasizing about it sucks--it's probably a bad scene.

If it's boring to write, it's going to be boring to read. Ask yourself why you wanted that scene. Is it even necessary? Can you cut it? Can you replace it with a different scene that serves the same purpose but approaches the problem from a different angle? If you can't remove the troublesome scene, what can you change about it that would make it interesting or exciting for you to write?

And I can't write sitting up to save my damn life. It's like my brain just stops working if I have to sit in a chair and stare at a computer screen. I need to be able to lie down, even if I don't use it! Talking walks and swinging in a hammock are also fantastic places to get scene ideas worked out, because the rhythmic motion also helps our brain process. It's just a little harder to work on a laptop in those scenarios. XD

In conclusion: Writing nonlinearly is an amazing tool for kicking writer's block to the curb. There's almost always some scene you'll want to write. If there isn't, you need to re-read or marinate.

Or you need to use the bathroom, eat something, or sleep. XD Seriously, if you're that stuck, assess your current physical condition. You might just be unable to focus because you're uncomfortable and you haven't realized it yet.

Anyway! I hope that was helpful, or at least interesting! XD Sorry again for the text wall. (I think this is the longest comment reply I've ever written!)

And same to you guys on tumblr--I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. XD Reblogs appreciated if so! (Maybe it'll help someone else!)

hey, hey. I don't know who needs to hear this, but--if you are a webcomic creator working with a publisher that tells you things like "your series is under preforming" as a reason why they can't meet certain, very basic requests you make, and leverages this vague statement against you as a way to position and request more from you--know that it is probably, definately, part of a script they use for every. single. creator. they work with.

If you are working hard, producing good work, meeting those deadlines, and communicating as well as you are able with the publisher, etc, you are a rockstar. Your series performance isn't YOUR job. It's their job to promote it and get those sales and numbers for you.

Don't let these companies get under your skin. They know you're working on something you are passionate about. They are banking on the assumption that you are trying to prove your own worth to yourself. They will say some extremely devaluing shit to you in their effort to squeeze as much out of you as possible.

When push comes to shove, if they can not provide what you need, then what you need is to walk away. You've got incredible skill and an incredible work ethic. If you didn't, they'd have never approached you in the first place. Know when a publisher is trying to tear you down for their own gain and leave 'em in the dirt. A publisher shouldn't be using language to make you feel like a disappointment. Nothing you've done for them is disappointing. They're not paying you enough.