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.
here’s your friendly reminder that firefox is a nonprofit organization and they’ve rolled out a bunch of ACTUAL privacy features in the past year alone, including complete built-in protection from tracking
Casually asks ‘who domesticated grain in your fantasy world?’ but while ripping her shirt off with a WWE stage and a roaring crowd just behind and slightly to the left.
So the thing about this is that, the grain is a metaphor*. Like, the grain is very much a metaphor. I don’t need a fantasy author to look me in the eye and say it was a guy named Tim. But the everything around food usually forms an enormous part of a society’s structure and culture. What are your fantasy world/kingdom/culture’s food sources? What internal myths do they have around the production of food? Customs? How do people share meals? What’s the etiquette? What are the differences between regions, ethnic groups, or social classes? Who spends their time making meals, and how much time is it? How many people can the food sources you create support? If someone breaks bread with a stranger, is that stranger now their friend? Who disagrees? What does your protagonist think? Why does your protagonist think?
An author doesn’t have to info dump all of this in the first chapter. But there’s a helluva difference between a small agrarian village one bad harvest away from starvation, and Picard ordering ‘Earl Gray, Hot’. (Although the local blacksmith and the annoyed personnel in Engineering being asked to fix another replicator after an irate captain kicked it may share a certain common spirit lol.)
And again, the grain is a metaphor. Except for when you very much should figure out the design of your fictional country. I find designing societies from their food source up interesting. Others won’t. But there should be something that a writer finds interesting about their fantasy that they want to explore. Find your grain.
Terry Pratchett read an interesting fact about clowns and eggs once, and decided to make that everyone’s problem. He famously read constantly, always looking for interesting things to put in his books and in some cases build his plots around. Your writing would benefit from the same mentality. The reader doesn’t need an entire encyclopedia thrown at them. But you should put thought into your setting and how it interacts with your culture, history, and society. If you don’t, or even worse if you aren’t sure how all of these interact, then it doesn’t matter how interesting you make your characters or plot. Readers will identify situations in your story where the characters and plot are in conflict with the setting you didn’t pay attention to.
It’s not that you need to fill out a hundred page questionnaire on your worldbuilding. It’s that your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to explore how things work will enrich your story for the reader. GRRM is absurdly good at the things he’s good at, a list that includes great character arcs, deftly controlling the reader’s sympathy, and intricate plots. His worldbuilding though is abysmal.** In contrast, elements of Anne Mccaffrey’s writing didn’t age well. Her first published book looks like a debut novel, her prose and characterization could have been improved on, and the pacing has issues. But she thought about how her world worked in ways that GRRM simply never bothered to. The effort she put into designing a society that would incorporate dragons into it’s structure, and the consideration she put into the needs of these dragons and their riders and how those would put stress on the social and political systems, is phenomenal. I do genuinely enjoy GRRM’s books lol. But if you wanted to read a novel that had dragons as a feature then Anne Mccaffrey’s Dragonflight is what I’ll recommend every time. Her characters actively use the clues given in how their society is designed to figure out their response to the overall plot, in a way that’s so much more rewarding then having GRRM pencil in years-long winter and then just ignore the implications.
Absolutely get invested in your characters and your plot! The reader will enjoy them all the more for the passion you bring. But your writing will always benefit from your curiosity in how the world you design works, and in how the characters and plot are actively informed by the setting. That’s the larger point. Cultivate that curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment, because that’s what will keep your plot, characters and setting from coming into conflict with each other.
*No it’s not, figure this out lol. Get Tim’s number. Has he figured out grain can be fermented yet. Is he free on Saturday.
**For more, the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is fantastic reading!
Did you know the Inca never invented the wheel?
Okay, that’s not entirely true. They did have wheeled toys for their children, like tiny little oxen you could roll along the floor. But they never invented the wheel as a means of transport.
You might think this is odd. The Inca were a very advanced people with cities, elaborate art, temples, and a “writing” system that actually involved using knotted cords and has changed our entire definition of “recorded language.”
But now I’m gonna show you something, and ask…
Does it make a little more sense now why they never bothered with the wheel?
If you were writing a book about people who lived in steep, inhospitable mountains, would it have occurred to you that “a series of terraces, via which things can be manually lowered or raised” would make more sense than wheels?
Who invented your grain?
this post is a lot of pressure but also useful
“Who invented your grain?” the human asked the mermaid.
An excellent response to this post!! Things we have going on in nine words:
A meeting between two species/cultures where one possibly doesn’t understand basic aspects behind the other.
The unspoken assumption by the human, who presumably lives either on land or on a ship, that mermaids eat a grain-based diet.
2.A If the human lives on land how are they interacting with the mermaid? There’s a story here.
2.B If the human lives a more nautical life, does their maritime culture rely on cereal crops? Do they eat a diet equally reliant on sea-based food and land-grown crops? More sea-based?
2.B.1 If the human is from a maritime culture, why do they NOT know what the mermaid eats? There’s a story here.
2.B.2 If the human is from a culture that relies on both sea and land supplied food, do they still culturally think of ‘food’ as something first grown? Is their culture an agricultural one that just ‘recently’ became ocean-faring? Or a maritime culture that is still dominated by a larger agricultural society? How does this human perceive themselves, as much a member of the ocean’s denizens as the mermaid or as a landlubber visitor?
3. ‘Who’ implies either individual identity or identification of one from several collective identities. Is the human asking which individual mermaid invented (or domesticated or discovered) the mermaid’s main cuisine? For a legendary figure who transmitted (or stole, or was taught) knowledge from ‘higher’ powers like gods to more ‘mortal’ mermaids? Or for which collective mermaid group/culture/nationality/shared identity created the basis for the mermaid diet?
3.1 Actually for that matter ‘who invented your grain’ could also be taken as a distinct question from ‘and who invented your grain’ {the human asked of the other mermaid from a different mermaid group floating by the ship}. Multiple mermaids could be present, or rather multiple marine-based species, some of which aren’t mermaids. The human could be asking the mermaid about their 'grain’, and then the octopus-maid about theirs, and the shrimp-maid next. Widen the camera lens and show us who else is in the scene!
4. The human is also assuming the mermaid keeps track both of time and of the transmission of ideas. Neither of these assumptions may be true! 'We’ve always eaten X’ is just as valid a response to write as 'It was mermaid Jeff Silvertail who was so hungry he took on the chore of proving crabs were delicious’. Both are fine responses, but then you have to write what either means for the actual culture.
5. Heck, do mermaids eat a grain-based diet? Are they growing cereal crops in giant air-filled bubble fields underwater? Or are they farming kelp forests in very similar visual parallels? Is that natural to the worldbuilding you’re doing? Does it mean that mermaids originated on land, and adapted their previous farming techniques when they moved, for whatever reason, underwater? Or were they taught to farm by land farmers? Or are kelp forests natural features of this world, and the human and mermaid talking are using more general terminology to communicate and there’s specialized terms mermaid-language terms to more accurately describe what they’re doing? Why doesn’t the human know these terms?
6. Is this even an interaction between two sentient beings? 'Who invented your grain?’ The human asks rhetorically as he stares into the tank containing the vicious human-eating supersized, yet not sentient, mermaid his scientific expedition captured.
7. Is the human using grain as a metaphor here, in a way the mermaid understands, because the two species are so dissimilar in how they do things that the language for more accurate communication hasn’t solidified yet? Does the mermaid understand the subtext, that 'grain’ means 'staple food’? That 'invent’ means 'what are the origin stories of your culture?’ Or does the mermaid not understand, and this is the very beginning of these two characters’ efforts to build a bridge across this divide?
8. Actually for that matter, grain is stationary. Except in the direst of circumstances. Are mermaids?? Is the human assuming here an image of mermaids staying in one spot for their food supply, in defiance of the tides?
This is what I brainstormed in about fifteen minutes. Nine words, and I can use them as a prompt in multiple different directions. Worldbuilding involves thinking about connections between concepts, and it also involves making conscious decisions about those concepts. The story I would write if given those nine words as a prompt would likely turn out very different from the story you would write, or the next person. All of the choices made for those stories would be valid! What would make each story distinctive though is how much effort the writer put into developing the answers, in any possible direction, to the question I asked above.
It’s understanding the background behind what’s going on between your characters and the background of the world they and their cultures operate in that really constitutes fictional worldbuilding.
Me, smacking someone who called Heavy stupid with a rolled up newspaper: he went to university whack and got his doctorate whack in Russian literature whack English is his second language whack to judge his intelligence on his speech whack is ignorant at best whack he couldn’t pursue his academic career bc he was imprisoned in a gulag whack whack whack whack whack
‘Revenge is bad’ to YOU. i love when a character destroys everyone who wronged them. i love when they get to bite and maim and tear and rip and scratch and kill. Sorry ur catholic about it but i’m different
riding an orbweaver into battle is sort of like trying to drive an armchair. they’re plump gals built to sit around and get full of food, and can really only move at speed on a silk web. maybe cosy to sit on like really big and colorful ottoman but you’re not going anywhere fast
I’d say either the bee or the dragonfly would be a fair choice, but both would probably be impossible to keep from chasing after any rivals they see, and would need constant fueling
the ant might be a decent choice, but given that they’re more or less blind and highly dependent on pheromone trails to know where the battle is, there’s a good chance you’d be wandering in circles constantly
the mantis would turn right around and eat you, no hesitation.
I’d say the crab is your best invertebrate option here, since it’s faster on land than any other animal in the poll, highly evasive on any terrain, has built-in armor, and can dispatch enemies with its chelae. you’d probably need to dunk it in saltwater after a while so it can breathe but otherwise, well-rounded battle mount
riding an orbweaver into battle is sort of like trying to drive an armchair. they’re plump gals built to sit around and get full of food, and can really only move at speed on a silk web. maybe cosy to sit on like really big and colorful ottoman but you’re not going anywhere fast
I’d say either the bee or the dragonfly would be a fair choice, but both would probably be impossible to keep from chasing after any rivals they see, and would need constant fueling
the ant might be a decent choice, but given that they’re more or less blind and highly dependent on pheromone trails to know where the battle is, there’s a good chance you’d be wandering in circles constantly
the mantis would turn right around and eat you, no hesitation.
I’d say the crab is your best invertebrate option here, since it’s faster on land than any other animal in the poll, highly evasive on any terrain, has built-in armor, and can dispatch enemies with its chelae. you’d probably need to dunk it in saltwater after a while so it can breathe but otherwise, well-rounded battle mount
