squirrelno2

[squirrelno2]

My brain is too bouncy for me to focus without external pressure at the moment so I'm going to create a word count goal based off whatever the vote percentages are and go for that. This is a very unimportant poll and there's no winner so if you just want to hit a button please do

#poll #fanfic related

[squirrelno2]

I think a big reason why "children are an oppressed group" gets (wrongly!) read as a "pedophile talking point" is that everyone treats children so terribly that actual child molesters can speedrun winning a kid's trust by like, actually respecting their needs and perspective, at least at first. Which means that the only way out of this mess is for all of us adults to treat children with respect, so that abusers can't use the rareness of that respect as a weapon.

[squirrelno2]

No see results option, I'm forcing you to perceive yourself. rb for more results plus

#there's a reason i met my partner online #i am a real dork in both contexts but online the people observing think thats cool #irl most of the people i interact with are between seven and fifteen and therefore think im the dorkiest person alive #which honestly as long as they enjoy my classes is kinda cool so. whatever #poll

[squirrelno2]

#stabbing someone with a lightsaber or possibly assassinating an emperor. which. really. if i pull either of those off good for me #considering the general lack of actual stabbable lightsabers in the world

[squirrelno2]

CONTEXT: the gaza freedom flotilla coalition aims to bring emergency aid (food, medical supplies, etc) to a starving and besieged gaza. activists and journalists from all over the world (including diaspora palestinians like dylan) will be participating, and they know the risk — in 2010 turkish activists attempting a similar mission had their flagship raided by israeli forces, who murdered 10 activists aboard (9 died on site and another died later from critical injuries).

[squirrelno2]

“I’m going to be a Captain someday.”

#oh this is rude #i love it #star wars #clone wars #somebodys very good fanart

[squirrelno2]

I want her to scoop him up so much. I think they would both enjoy it. Sweep the man off his feet, as they say!

#they.... #bg3 #wyll #karlach #somebodys very good fanart

[squirrelno2]

...........................................................

#i grew up in contemporary dance classes to florence how do you NOT know - it is fine its FINE. #'who is florence welch' what the hell man thats embarrassing swifties who dont know florence should be embarrassed #florence is the one doing all the things you pretend taylor is doing thats who she is

[squirrelno2]

My list of projects: all right you have to update the time slip fic on Wednesday, you have four other wip fics on ao3 that you could work on, you have an original novel in the revision stages and its sequel that you're drafting -

my brain: it is TIME

me: time for what

my brain: time to create an in depth plan of how the clone wars would have gone if echo and fives had died on rishi and cutup, droidbait, and hevy had survived

#priorities WHO. never met them #but also. also i've created the hevy centric time travel fic. did you know she's everything to me.

[squirrelno2]

“I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist, I'm Arab, and I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing.

And when someone dies, news travels fast. Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today.

Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war.

Israel is not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts. These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made.

I'll start with Sadi Mansour. Sadi was the director of Al-Quds News Network, and he posted a 22-second video on November 18. That was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage.

Sadi's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the Internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues.

He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes,

‘Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home. We were really sad.

I kept telling the kids, Look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you.

Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kapse? Bring your friends with you, it's okay.

And give Azeez the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha ha ha.

I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad.

Okay, I love you. Bye.’

A few hours after he shared that letter, Sadie and his co-worker Hassouna Saleem were at Sadie's home, when they were killed by an Israeli air strike that hit his house.

His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived.

Gaza is tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people. Like with Brahim Lafi.

Brahim was a photojournalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7. He was just 21, still new to journalism.

On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist.

Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Brahim from his co-worker Rushdie Sarraj. In this photo, Brahim staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young.

The caption reads, My assistant is gone. Brahim is gone. Rushdie himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker.

And I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Brahim. I read the tribute post to him too.

I saw this over and over again. Journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them.

And then the pattern continues.

Thank you.

Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists later in the war who had become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos. And those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true.

One video like that was posted by Ayat Hadduro. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range from what I can tell, interviews about women in politics.

She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera. Once the war started, Ayat's pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages.

On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is. It's scary.

‘This is likely my last video. Today, the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lahya area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky, ordering everyone to evacuate.

Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go.

But everyone else has evacuated. They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary.

What's happening is so tough, and may God have mercy on us.’

She was killed later that day.

Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime. So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by the Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases.

And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings. When we reached out to the IDF for comments, they said, quote, the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists. That's the answer they always give in these situations.

Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza. Journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting.

It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure.

Thank you.

The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdullah, because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine.

I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes, and I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago. He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut. I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a sperm freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself.

I know, ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot. Right after we said cut and started to rap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it, and no one could stop laughing.

It was a really good day that felt good to remember and to remember him that way. Issam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing.

He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war.

A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video. The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the AFP, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalists before the IDF shot at them.

The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. I had only met Issam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died. I know that he understood the risks of his job, but somehow it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet, and a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field.

I find myself thinking about him all the time. His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter Shereen Abou Aql who had been killed by the IDF. When I first saw that post in October, I thought how ironic because a week later, Isam also was killed by the IDF.

But then, after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become. I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long.

A tweet from reporter Al-Abdallah that quoted Sylvia Plath. It read, What ceremony of wars can patch the havoc? I'm going to keep going down the list, even though this story is over now.

Just for myself. My own way of bearing witness. Which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do.”

—DANA BALLOUT, The 95. Dana sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. Dana is a Lebanese-American, Emmy-nominated documentary producer.

[squirrelno2]

New wip development ask game

Couldn't find a wip ask game that focused on a new or developing wip, so I made one of my own.

1. What's the log line for your wip?

2. Describe the plot in one sentence

3. Describe your wip badly

4. Describe the main characters

5. What are the main themes?

6. What kind of readers would be fans of this wip?

7. What are the main emotions of this wip?

8. What are the vibes/aesthetics of this wip?

9. What are the genres of this wip?

10. Describe the tropes present in this wip

11. Any characters you had to cut?

12. What inspired this wip

13. Do you like working on more wips at once?

14. Where will the wip start?

15. What do you like about this wip

16. What do you find frustrating about this wip

17. What are you worried about in this wip

18. What are your goals with this wip

19. Describe the setting of your wip

20. Describe your favourite location

21. How would you describe your WIP’s narrative style? (1st person, 3rd person, multiple POVs, single POV, alternating chapters, etc.)

22. Do you know your OCs personality types (ennegram/mbti etc)

23. How would you describe your writing style

24. What is the most important question to answer about your characters

25. Name the three most important things for you to plan

26. What do you still need to plan?

27. Look for three images which best showcase the overall aesthetic for your WIP

28. If you could pick three songs to capture the feel of your WIP, what would they be and why?

29. Books or series or movies influenced your writing style the most?

30. What stories are the most similar to yours / comp titles?

[squirrelno2]

WIP. Finally decided, after 3 years, to finish this

#star wars #clone wars #somebodys very good fanart #captain rex

[squirrelno2]

[squirrelno2]

no fear

next work playlist update includes taylor swift since she dropped that new fuckass album

one fear

#thank FUCK i don't work retail anymore #dance teachers pick their own playlists so if the kids ask for taylor i can simply say 'sorry she doesnt do the right style' and move tf on

[squirrelno2]

I need a story where the hero and villain switch places. Like the hero gets worse and worse and becomes worse than the villain and the villain says "hey now maybe this isn't cool" and has to stop the hero from whatever. Does that exist lol.

#...Contemplating this so hard actually. watch me invent brand new people to make sad in star wars. again.

[squirrelno2]

Someday I'll like. Fix my scanner so I can scan these instead of taking shitty phone pictures. But today is not that day, today is just for me to say "look I think I made it better with colours!"

#my art #Ven (oc)

[squirrelno2]

For the palette challenge - Fox in 'my wife left me'?

Fox engaging in behaviour befitting a Marshall Commander

The Shit Poopoo Palette Gauntlet

#star wars #clone wars #somebodys very good fanart #commander fox #beloved and a mood really