No, I Don't Want To Hold Your Baby. That Doesn't Mean I Wish Bad Things Upon It, Ffs.

For the Nonnie who asked me to share some of the response to the performative "all eyes on Rafah" campaign, I hope it's okay if I add to the two images you sent me, and turn to the people sharing that AI generated image...

If all eyes are on Rafah, are you seeing Hamas' abuse, torture and even killing of its own Gazan civilians?

("Resistance is justified when people are occupied!" Cool cool, but what kind of a "resistance" attacks its own people?)

If all eyes are on Rafah, where were your eyes on Oct 7?

If all eyes are on Rafah, 'coz Gazan kids being burned alive (by Hamas, even though Israel got falsely blamed for it) is so unacceptable, then where were your eyes when our kids were burned alive by Hamas? In the pic: 2 years old Omer Siman Tov, who was deliberately burned alive by Hamas terrorists together with his entire family, his parents and two older sisters, in their own home.

If all eyes are on Rafah, do you see Kfir Bibas, kidnapped at the age of 9 months together with both his parents and his 4 years old brother Ariel? Kfir is the youngest hostage in the world ever (second youngest ever was Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., who was kidnapped at 20 months old in 1932).

If all eyes are on Rafah, are you seeing our other molested hostages?

If all eyes are on Rafah, are you seeing Hamas' rocket launchers which continuously operate and target our civilians from there? (note the dates vary from Dec 7, 2023 to May 26, 2024)

If all eyes are on Rafah, where the IDF did strike and kill two senior Hamas leaders, Yassin Rabia and Khaled Najjar, near (but not at) a shelter tent camp, are you seeing that Hamas deliberately chooses to risk its own civilians by having its leaders carry out consultation meetings so close to regular people?

If all eyes are on Rafah, why did you see the rescue of two of our elderly hostages (and the killing of the terrorists who tried to prevent the success of this operation) as a massacre? And why did you claim this was Israel invading Rafah back on Feb 12 already, when the actual ground operation in that city only started in May?

If all eyes are on Rafah because you care about the Palestinians so much, where were your eyes when Palestinians were endangered and killed by fellow Arabs?

If all eyes are on Rafah, where almost a million people have been evacuated by May 20 already, then whose eyes are on Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Ukraine among other places, where the murders of hundreds of thousands in each (and altogether, millions) is being carried on unchallenged? Where are the campaigns for the people whose slaughter you can't weaponize against the Jewish state?

If you shared that graphic, but didn't do anything about any of the other things listed in this post, you don't actually care. You just want to seem as if you do.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

You never need to wait for a Black Friday sale to download NASA images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes: They’re FREE! 

Images are in the public domain and may be freely used. Search by “observations” or keyword within Hubble’s images:https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images

Or Webb’s: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images

Once again, Tumblr manages to succeed via just being honest with their users.

I made a post back around April fool's about the crabs being so popular because the joke was that every other website tries to trick you into clicking things so they can make money from your clicks and what if instead a website just asked "please click this revenue generating crab. It is there to generate revenue. In return you will have clicked on a crab. Nothing more." And the answer to that question was "people will frantically click on that crab. They don't hate the idea of the website getting money, they hate the idea of being profited on against their will".

So Tumblr implemented actual revenue crabs. "For this much money you can fill your or someone else's dash with virtual crabs. This will have the effect of there being crabs on their screen."

And people will buy those crabs. Because yes you're spending money on something stupid and useless but it's being sold to you as "hey you want something stupid and useless?", which is a nice change of pace from every other site trying to make itself out to be something more than what it is.

Twitter is floundering with the checkmark system because it's being sold as "confirm that you are someone important and who you say you are is true", which it isn't at all right now because anyone can buy one. You're buying a useless checkmark that only says that YOU think you're important. Or, more often than not right now, you are intending to trick other people into thinking you're someone you're not.

Meanwhile, Tumblr just said "Consider this double check mark. It does nothing. You will be marking yourself as someone who paid money for a meaningless checkmark and sometimes it will randomly turn into a bunch of crabs, making the site harder to use". And the userbase is like "Well sure, that sounds delightful."

The point is, despite what all the marketing and advertising people have tried to say, painting trash gold and trying to pass it off as something better is almost never as effective as just saying "hey you want this trash?"

Why yes, in fact, I do.

#relatable

Dara Horne said it best, "People Love Dead Jews."

Another Jew on here commented that people were going onto Wikipedia and removing references to certain people's Jewishness, and I just saw for myself that this is true. As a Jew and a fan of old movies and history, I was looking up a list of Jewish actors on Wikipedia. I saw Tina Louise (you know, from Gilligan's Island) pop up. So I popped over to her actual page on Wikipedia. And there were zero references to her being Jewish. So I hopped on over to the Wayback Machine (bless you, Internet Archive) and put in the URL for her Wikipedia page. And wouldn't ya know it: before 10/7, there were at least 3 to 5 references to her Jewishness at any given time on her Wikipedia page. Wtf is happening.

K.A. Applegate's letter to fans re: the ending the Animorphs series

Dear Animorphs Readers:

Quite a number of people seem to be annoyed by the final chapter in the Animorphs story. There are a lot of complaints that I let Rachel die. That I let Visser Three/One live. That Cassie and Jake broke up. That Tobias seems to have been reduced to unexpressed grief. That there was no grand, final fight-to-end-all-fights. That there was no happy celebration. And everyone is mad about the cliffhanger ending.

So I thought I’d respond.

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.

That’s what happens, so that’s what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn’t by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it’s a start.

Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating. There’s very little chanting of ‘we’re number one’ among people who’ve personally experienced war.

I’m just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I’ve never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn’t going to do it at the end. I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn’t have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.

K.A. Applegate

A kid’s book series that didn’t coddle it’s readers just because they were children? How awesome is that? I think this series did an even better job than Harry Potter at showing how horrible and horrifying war is. Harry Potter still gave us that happy “everyone is married and has a family” epilogue, and we rarely (if ever) saw the characters truly dealing with nightmares or PTSD like symptoms from what they’d experienced. Animorphs showed readers how horrifying war is from the start - book 1 has Jake suffering through nightmares because of what he’d seen. Animorphs doesn’t give readers the easy “all of x group are evil” way out. The series starts off allowing readers to think Andalites = good and Yeerks = bad, but then goes on to fully pull the rug out from underneath us when we learn how Andalites treat disabled members of their society, and how horrible it is for Yeerks when they don’t have a host. Nothing about the war is comfortable for either the readers or the main characters.

This series ran from 1996-2001, and the characters are 13 when the war starts, and 16 when it ends. Each book is between 150 and 200 pages long, and even though there are a butt ton of books, I think everyone who enjoys YA/childrens lit should give them a shot. Though if you do, beware extreme 90s-ness. Many plot lines and jokes are extremely reliant on the time in which the books take place, so the sooner you get “if they’d had a cell phone, this wouldn’t even be a thing” out of your head, the better. Like, one of the books’ plot is that the CEO of the AOL equivalent is being targeted, and that would allow the alien invading force to control the entire internet. So yea, it’s very of it’s era. But still excellent!