#i just havent seen anything about this thread on tumblr yet

[stil-lindigo]

link

on twitter, a viral thread started where people around the world shared their translations of “If I must die”, the last work of Dr Refaat Alareer also known as "the voice of Gaza". A beloved poet, teacher and life-long activist for Palestine, he was recently assassinated along with members of his extended family by a targeted Israeli air strike. His loss leaves a hole in the heart of palestinians all over the world.

Below the cut, I’ll be posting the translations of his poem, with links to the original posts. Unfortunately, tumblr limits posts to a maximum of 30 images. I will update when I can.

Arabic (Refaat’s mother tongue)

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2. Spanish

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3. Irish

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4. Dutch

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5. Greek

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6. German

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7. Vietnamese

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8. Tagalog

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9. Serbian

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10. Japanese

and the traditional japanese calligraphy version

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11. Nepali

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12. Tamil

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13. Bosnian

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14. Indonesian

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15. Romanian

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16. Italian

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17. Albanian

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18. Urdu

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19. Turkish

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20. Polish

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21. Norwegian

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22. Galician

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23. Swedish

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24. Jawi

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25. Bengali

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26. Russian

#probably one of the most beautiful threads to ever grace twitter's rotten husk of a platform #i really earnestly almost cried #when people say the world stands with palestine #they mean they speak with palestine as well #israel murders palestinian poets to silence their voice. their culture. their lifeblood #in response the world amplifies his voice tenfold #but what a loss #what an unforgivable loss #i hope it is some consolation to those who loved refaat that his words are now immortalised in languages all over the world #that he has united so many people in their pursuit of palestinian freedom #please please please feel free to add your own translations onto the post in reblogs #i just havent seen anything about this thread on tumblr yet #im just the messenger #palestine will be free #the words of refaat alareer will be immortalised #and his students will carry on his legacy #ah but it is almost 5am and i havent slept #when i wake up i will add more #free palestine #israel #refaat alareer #rest in peace

[end-otw-racism]

End OTW Racism Link Round-up: Week 2!

Our first (hopefully of many) two-week #EndOTWRacism action is over! Check out our post on next steps and how to stay involved if you haven’t already. 

Just like our first week link round-up, here’s a collection of some of the longer-form discussion/analysis that people shared in week two (we're going with posts on tumblr, dreamwidth, and other sites, as well as twitter threads that are longer than three tweets). These are posts that we think would be helpful to consider as fandom engages in the necessary conversations about these issues.

Note: There has been a plethora of information that’s come out about OTW in the past week, particularly from former and current volunteers, which calls into question the way the organization functions and details the harm they have done to their own volunteers. Much of it does not directly reference our campaign or racism, so we won’t be sharing all of that conversation here, but you can find a round-up of that conversation at the dreamwidth account synonymous.

Tumblr

seepunkrun: I haven’t heard back from the OTW on this yet. In fact, I’m still waiting for a reply to the last letter I sent them on this subject. That’s why I’m glad to see increased transparency included in @end-otw-racism’s list of demands [link]

wondersmith-and-sons: if we're gonna be frank about otw's "anti-racism policies"/hiring of diversity consultants/attempt for social change, i'm gonna say that my good faith in them has run out a while ago and that i genuinely don't think they ever had the intention to follow through on tackling racial abuse, like, ever. [link]

elumish: In response to criticism about EndOTWRacism (part 2): one of the main questions that I see a lot about stuff like this is, how do we write policy to keep there it from backfiring or being used for purges? [link]

princeescaluswords: Activism Isn’t a Raincoat [link]

massharp1971: The right want free speech, but only for themselves [link]

Twitter

tea_deviation: this is even further off topic, but I was doing the math here and it boggles my fucking mind that ao3 is not driving towards being endowment funded? [link]

fiercynonym: i mentioned, as an aside in my thread about how OTW appears to have $2.5 MILLION that they are spending on absolutely nothing, that francesca coppa received a fan studies grant from OTW once, but i want to talk about that specific piece a little more [link]

generalfrings: For all the disingenuous raising of "concerns" at #EndOTWRacism over hypothetical volunteers that would hypothetically handle racists in AO3 (+ the dismissal of the real current harm on poc and black fans), I want to see some response for OTW actually traumatizing real volunteers [link]

_impertinence: #EndOTWRacism the way chinese fans have been sidelined and belittled by the org is so fucking disgusting [link]

hydrochaeris3: ok full disclosure this came about bc i was thinking about why i havent seen people be "pro worker" (or in the otw/ao3's case "pro volunteer") more in response to the endotwracism campaign. bc in most leftist circles ik that ppl would use workers rights arguments to push back on [link]

saathi1013: If it's anything I've learned from contemporary activism it's this: it's never "just" racism. [link]

cyrilapologist: worth considering that end otw racism is also a labor issue [link]

hydrochaeris3: stalking IS bad but i do think it's real funny that so many bnfs are coming out of the woodwork to say smthn about how upsetting it is that this white person got stalked instead of literally anything for #EndOTWRacism for the last two whole weeks [link]

aral_was_here: I'm going to keep the pfp and account name for a bit because I'm feeling pissed about how #EndOTWRacism has been dismissed by so many fans as virtue signaling or as a smokescreen for certain people they see as fandom boogeymen lying in wait to take our porn at a moment's notice. [link]

Dreamwidth

beatrice_otter: Signal boost: "Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW", by chestnut_pod (with background & highlights) [link]

wistfuljane: Mythical Dragons & Wild Unicorns: A Decade Later [link]

naye: The Glorious 25th of May - #EndOTWRacism [link]

naye: OTW needs a lot more transforming [link]

Other sites

enk-dash-one at fandom.ink: 1/3 Fellow white people, I encourage you to read this thread first: Then, I'd like to add, speaking exclusively to fellow white people who are worried about this: we are already racist. [link] 

Klaudiasays on TikTok: let's get #EndOTWRacism trending [link]

Stitch for Teen Vogue: As #EndOTWRacism Fights for AO3 Policy Changes, Fandom Racism Bubbles to the Surface [link]

We'd love for folks to keep discussing the issues raised during this action! We organizers are probably going to go quiet for a little while to gather ourselves and work on moving forward, but if you send us posts by submitting to our tumblr, tweeting at us, messaging us on dreamwidth, or emailing us at endotwracism [at] gmail [dot], we will consider linking or posting them. We do reserve the right to only share posts that are in line with the intent of the campaign and that we believe are adding to the conversation.

#end otw racism #racism in fandom #ao3 #otw #organization for transformative works #archive of our own #fandom racism #endotwracism #link round up

[orcelito]

ooooookay so i havent seen anyone on tumblr talk about this directly yet so i figured i'd make a post linking to ppl talking about it. im not personally involved, but since this is an artist i recognize & see around, i figure ppl have the right to know

so uh. long story short. @/valdrickvile on here is kinda uhhhhhh not someone you'd wanna interact with, maybe.

^ this thread goes into it

& in case anything happens to the tweets, here's the big document that goes into it. ive read thru a good amount of it and uh........... yeah.

im not sharing this as a call to harass the people involved (Please Dont) but just. people have a right to know. so pls just block and move on.

#speculation nation #adding the disclaimer there. i am NOT doing this as some toxic callout post or anything. #there's just some... really bad shit in there lol & it makes me personally very uncomfortable with interacting with his stuff anymore #so. people deserve to know. #i contemplated posting this in main tag but decided against it. bc i really dont wanna poke the hornet's nest lol #but for my followers. Here You Go. #twitter goers have probably seen this already but i havent seen this on tumblr yet (aside from a vague mention of it that alerted me to it) #had to dig. ended up getting this post from someone in my server sldkjfsldkfj #SO. sharing so u guys dont have to dig for it. #i spent too long reading thru all these screenshots and just. eugh.

[spearxwind]

Part 1: Hey! I love your art/OCS and your blog has introduced me to your friends who also have awesome OCs. This made me notice that Tumblr and Twitter seem to interact with original characters differently. I'd love to meet people and friends who'd like to interact with my OC doodles, but Twitter feels like a difficult space to get interaction, despite more artists moving over there. Whereas years ago, I had ask blogs for my fan-made and original characters which received plenty of interaction.

hi! yeah, from my experience twitter is a lot more eh... hostile when it comes to looking for interaction. it's a site that runs on people making short slapstick posts, with very limited characters, so people generally cant even talk a lot about their ocs in the first place. twitter also hides long threads, condenses them in your feed so you dont really see them

most artists have moved there bc of the nsfw ban, and generally twitter has a lot more users, so its a lot easier to find an audience IF, and only IF you already have a couple people to spread your posts around, bc twitter doesnt have the same kind of tagging system as tumblr does

ive definitely found more artists to follow through twitter but because of the super fast paced nature of the site (and also my short attention span) i dont really have time to get to know about peoples ocs at all

to answer your questions though:

1. posting on tumblr now gets me a LOT less interaction/notes than it used to. legit. i get maybe, 100-200 notes tops on normal posts when years ago i used to get twice or three times that. i get SOME more on generally popular ocs/designs bc people are like oohhh ahhh aesthetic but yeah. HOWEVER, it DOES occassionally get me curious people asking questions about my ocs which is ultimately what i really want. posting on twitter gets me a lot more attention (i mean, fucking compare my latest art, 340 notes on tumblr versus 4k total on twitter) but all the interaction with that tweet is people going 'oohh ahh thats so cool!!' but on tumblr SOMETIMES MAYBE i get questions going like ‘so based on ur last art, does oc do X’ or i get anons saying funny shit and its rly nice, i dont rly get that on twitter a whole lot 

2. dont fucking know how i drew in my crowd. i wish i did though so i could avoid it lmao. ii know back in 2015 i racked up a bunch of people/notoriety bc of httyd2 and i kinda rode that out into dragons and then creatures and then edgy stuff. i also am usually the one going out to people and going ‘wow ur ocs are sick bro can u tell me about them pwease’ especially on here bc again, its so much harder to do that on twitter

last notes: 

- ive seen ppl on twitter make side accounts specifically for oc talking. i myself have a personal account where i just go off abt ocs on occassion, but its also my private account that maybe 4 friends have total, i dont allow random people in. i rly wish i could do that on here though o

- on twitter anything you post will be gone from peoples feeds in 24 hours roughly. thats just how it is. you dont see people retweeting things that are super old unless the artist themself rts it and gets it circling for a day or two more. and yet without doing jack shit i have posts of mine circulating here on tumblr for fucking years, inexplicably. people are still reblogging my httyd posts, and following me for some very specific fanart i made in 2017 and i am like.why are you here. how did you find this 

- i HAVE seen my shit stolen/ripped off on tumblr a lot more than twitter though, but i think thats just because its easier for ppl on twitter to slip under the radar if they never interact with u. who knows though i havent exactly studied this 

idk if any of this is helpful but its my personal experience. im just rly biased towards twitter i hate it. i wish i could leave but 99% of my client base is there so i cant -_-

#ask #advice #legally can i tag that? idk #long post #as an extra sidenote. ive personally stopped sharing so much of my oc stuff on both sites because of the theft #im just so tired lol #but i used to share so much on tumblr. just make big huge posts about my ocs with their info

[sylviathewanderer-blog]

Today I took the first step down the road in the long journey that is my life. I have tried, and failed miserably, to live my life as the person I was told that I was born to be for 32 years. Every day I looked at his face in the mirror and tried to avoid eye contact with him as I brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and cleaned his body. Then I'd put on his heavy, coarse threaded clothing and plod my way along the path of his life, doing my best to try and play his part in the world the right way all the while knowing that I am not the right actor for his role. I've known my entire life that something wasn't right, that I was the problem. I comforted myself by saying that I'm just different from the other guys. I couldn't have been more right. Well. . . Perhaps instead I was so wrong that I became right coming the other way around. I'm different from all of the other guys because I was never a guy to begin with. I have been a woman all along. I've been a woman wearing a terrible man-skin coat doing her best to stand up and roar loud enough to scare all of the real men away so she could be alone to plant her flowers, care for her animals, and write out her long fantasy stories. At first I thought this feminine side of myself was something new until I became curious about the person I heard pounding on the other side of the walls I had built around them as a child. When I ripped away the cracked bricks and mortar I found a familiar face staring back at me. We hadn't seen eachother since I tried to bury her back when I was 7. When my sister became 10 she got her ears pierced as is tradition in our family. From that day she was a big girl and couldn't be bothered to play with her annoying little brother anymore. I loved my sister more than anything and cherished our time together especially since I could always count on her to chase away all of the bullies who tortured me every day at school for being weird. Her pulling away tore out my heart and so one day I came up with a solution that would make us both happy. I asked her to help turn me into a girl. Because I was 7 and she was 10 (aaaaand our father was a MAJOR homophobe who thought that even hanging his clothes on a pink hanger would make him magically turn gay. Try to visualize the logic there! "Honey, did you put my favorite shirt on a pink hanger again?" "No, I don't think so. Why?" "Because I am FAAABULOUUUS!!!" lol A couple of grizzled bikers sit at a dingy bar. One looks over at his drinking partner after a long ride and notices something off about his undershirt. "The wife wash yer whites with a red sock again?" "Yeah. And now I wanna go out and kiss all the boys, dammit!" He says sullenly staring into the golden froth. "I know how that goes. Mine hung my leathers on the pink hanger yesterday!" He growls draining another beer. The man in the pinkened shirt looks over curiously "You wanna go make out?" "Yeah, sure." (Sorry, I'm an amateur comedy writer so I am prone to these odd drifts of thought!)) We decided that the best way to make me a girl was to dress me in her clothes. I stripped down and put on her panties and night gown and we talked, played barbies, and listened to the radio all night. I became so comfortable and felt so natural that we lost track of time and forgot what I was wearing. . . Then my father came home from the bar! That night was so traumatic that I became afraid to ever express that side of myself again and so I sewed together my man-suit, locked my true self behind those walls and did my best to forget about her. She is stronger than we knew though, and she has manifested herself all of my life. Once I became a teenager I grew my hair out. It was always my best feature and became the only thing that I felt was really me. I would swell with an odd pride whenever a woman complimented me on my hair and being told how jealous of it they were thrilled me to know end. Once I got my first job and was buying my own clothes I picked out light, breezey khakis, white undershirts and cotton button up shirts to wear open over them. They were mostly brightly colored Hawaiian shirts or subdued floral patterns in more traditional male colors. I loved them and they became a part of my unique style. Then there were the flowers. I love gardening and growing any kind of plant, so I kept baskets of flowers on any surface in my room that got enough light to support them. And then there's my tea set collection. My mother caught me playing with the first one in a shop and went back to buy it for me for Christmas that year. I loved it and it quickly grew into a collection that I now have decorating my room in an array of shadowboxes. I've struggled with this identity for all of my life that I can remember, and I suspect it goes back even further than that, but who really knows there. I can remember getting bullied in school for months when I curtsied while the music teacher was teaching us the ediquet for our school play. Turns out i was supposed to bow instead. Whoops! Not that it mattered, really. Those kids had sniffed me out as being different long, long before that. Could have been because I was shy and meek. . . Oooor maybe it was the clover flower crowns and necklaces I taught the girls to make and would even wear around the playground myself. Could have been that. *sagely nod* I met another trans woman recently and I told her about how much I loved my hair and that it was killing me that I am going bald and that my hair looks terrible now. She smiled at me and made a joke about giving me her hormone pills that could regrow my hair so long as I didn't mind also growing breasts. I felt such a sudden and deep yearning that I must have made a face because she quickly hid the bottle and changed the subject, though she did offer them again later with the same joke, probably to test the waters and confirm what she was suspecting. I made a joke and brushed it aside. Later, I would go home and while staring at my scalp in the bathroom mirror, brake into tears. I hadn't cried in over a decade so it turned into a sob, then bawling, and then into full blown weeping. I sat on the toilet trying to collect myself and had an epiphany. I was mad at myself for being too weak and timid to accept her offer. I knew then that if given the choice I would happily, gladly, and proudly trade my penis to whomever I had to to get my hair back. I've been an asexual my entire life so it's not like I use the damned thing for anything other than urination anyway! What use do I have for it? Give me back my damned hair!! It was then that all of those feelings and all of those dreams about being turned into a woman made sense to me. All of the female characters I had made in video games and had spent more time designing than I did doing whatever the game was about seemed like obvious signs. So there I was, the crumbled debris lying at my feet. And there she was, my true self, a golden outline of a woman with soft kind eyes staring through my soul telling me that it was alright. I could cry now. I was finally safe. She smiled at me and I tried to smile back, but couldn't. I already was. We were finally one again. We were whole. We were just I again. Somewhere, I felt as if my male persona was waving at me, laughing like he always did when he knew things were going to be their toughest. Somewhere The Drifter faded away and left me alone with myself, with The Wanderer. So I smiled again, and took the first step on my long road. I am going on my first journey, the one to get back my long, golden brown hair and to become the woman I was always meant to be. I came out to my mother today. She told me she always knew, but thought that I would always stay the effeminate man I was. She told me that she is proud that I found my strength to fight for what I really want. She told me that she loves me and that she will always love me unconditionally. Then she text me a few hours later to tell me that she loves me again. I am so lucky to have her as my mother and my guide. Many of our brothers and sisters aren't so lucky and find themselves disowned or worse. She divorced my father when i was 16 and I havent talked to him in at least a decade, so I don't care what he thinks. I'll mail his name and legacy back to him when I find the time. I don't need them anymore, and they never really belonged to me to begin with. This is my first day as an open trans woman and I don't even have a real name yet. I haven't talked to a doctor about hormone replacement therapy, but I absolutely will. I am going to begin saving money for my surgery too. So on this day, I declare to the world, to myself, and to the people of Tumblr that I am a transgendered woman! I am proud! I am strong! And I am coming for my GOD DAMNED HAIR!!

#Transgender #Trans Woman #Coming Out #LGBTQA #New Girl