Perpetually Procrastinating

one thing you won't know until you experience it for yourself when you create art out of love is how it feels when people receive it with love. when you post a doodle and someone keeps it as their lockscreen, or when you write a story and someone tells you they were thinking about it all day, or when you post a poem and someone shares it with a touching caption. doesn't matter if it was objectively good or not. matters that someone spent time with it, that someone really, really liked it, and you made it. this kind of interaction, i think, it can really sustain you for weeks. it can sustain you through a lot of terrible things. its confirmation that you exist, and that (however briefly) your existence was appreciated by someone else through your art.

Hi! I’m doing the usual reminder post to mention how we're looking for artists who are available to do guest pieces. If you're on the list already, you can let me know if you're still available and if your prices are the same.

And if you haven’t heard of this before, the basic idea is that every month I make a post about the progress planned at GB Patch Games for the coming weeks. I like to include an image of one of our characters as a part of the update post.

The artist is credited and we don’t use the work for anything other than that monthly progress plan post. The artists set their own rates, they use their own styles, and the complexity of the image is flexible. Each guest piece is commissioned early in the month and needs to be completed before the end of the month.

Occasionally, we have guest pieces for other situations, such as celebrating the launch of a new demo or DLC. The overall process for how the commission goes is the same whether it’s for an update post or a special occasion post.

If you’d like to be considered, please just send me a message with some example images and your estimate rates!

Thank you for checking this out 💕

israel has now officially been announced as one of the countries participating in eurovision 2024

meanwhile russia is still banned, for the third year in a row. the double standard is just sickening

if you're european, you should 1) put pressure on your national broadcaster to withdraw from the contest. if the national selection goes through, then 2) pressure the individual artist(s) to withdraw from the contest. if come may, and israel is still participating, you should 3) boycott eurovision as a viewer, 4) pressure local establishments (clubs, gay bars etc.) to cancel their eurovision events, 5) intensify the pressure against your national broadcaster and its representing artist(s). never let them forget, even for a moment, the genocide they're complicit in.

also, if you're swedish, you have a special responsibility to protest as you're this years host country.

i just wanna emphasize that it's important the pressure is leveled at individual countries and artists, not the EBU as a whole. trying to pressure the EBU directly, be it through social media, emails, phone calls or whatnot, is likely just a waste of time.

the EBU doesn't care that they come off as callous hypocrites. but having individual countries withdraw from the contest? that's not only bad PR, it's also a loss of revenue

even just one country withdrawing as a direct protest against israel's participation is a big hit to the EBU. and there are already several countries i can realistically see withdrawing based on their previous reactions to israel hosting in 2019

also, for countries with a hardline pro-israel stance, pressure might be more effective if it's primarily be directed at the participating artist(s).

is it realistic, for instance, to get the BBC to withdraw from eurovision? no. but the individual artist...? with unrelenting, daily reminders that they're supporting a genocide? maybe.

at least we can ensure that participating in a nakedly pro-genocide eurovision will be a miserable affair for everyone involved.

remember south africa: boycotting works

even if you don't care about eurovision, and has never watched it, you should still get involved. eurovision is one of the biggest non-sporting television events in the world. and getting israel banned from big international events like this is exactly the kind of pressure that needs to applied right now

israel, as long as its occupational apartheid regime remains, shouldn't be allowed to participate in *any* international events, period. but getting them removed from say, the olympics, will be a much bigger struggle than a music contest that so comically prides itself on its image of inclusion and international unity

and maybe it's wishful thinking, but eurovision might be an opportune moment to open the floodgates of getting israel removed from other international events as well

rachel corrie’s letters

on december 9th, there is a wisconsin all out for palestine rally in madison. i really encourage anyone who is in this state and has the means to travel to madison to show up for this especially as more people are showing "fatigue" for the palestinian cause and social media posts dwindle.

if you're in milwaukee, the local chapter of JVP is arranging transportation help if you dont have a car and the badger bus is also a relatively inexpensive and convenient option, it runs multiple times per day and will take you about 30 mins walking or a quick uber trip to the capital if you select the 'campus and lake' stop.

p.s. i know madison in general is pretty milquetoast + white liberal-y, but the activism and rallies for palestine specifically lately have been extremely well organized, meaningful, actually leftist and abolitionist, calling for more than a ceasefire, and led by/centered palestinian-americans & other SWANA organizers.

please please reblog, even if you're not from here, to boost! already 1 person in wi has learned about this action from THIS POST at less than 100 notes. like Yara Eid said, we must keep fighting for their lives!

[ID: instagram post from @.GazaMedicVoices. Text over the gridded numbered map of Gaza released by the IOF reads: “We are no longer in Rafah, we are in ‘block XX.’ The reality is uglier than anyone can imagine because what is happening to us has never happened before.” - Surgeon displaced to south of Gaza, 1/12/23. The post caption reads: Israel has started using a numbered grid system for evacuation warnings, accessed via a QR code on leaflets dropped from the sky and via social media. This has led to terror and confusion as people struggle to find refuge from the heavy bombardment. /end ID]

These “evacuation zones” are extermination zones. The IOF has 0 intention of letting anyone move freely in Gaza. They shoot people who try to move to the places they’re told to evacuate to, and many people can’t move at all because everything around them is under constant bombardment. Most Gazans don’t have internet to view these “evacuation notices” in the first place, because the IOF bombed Gaza’s communications infrastructure. This map is another weak attempt to convince the world that they’re trying to “minimize casualties,” but like most Zionist propaganda, it’s just more evidence of their atrocities. They have literally divided Gaza into death chambers.

In the wake of renewed Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, with seemingly no end in sight and countless Palestinian civilians killed, many people are wondering how they can contribute to the effort to prevent more loss of life. And one of the most common phrases shared in calls to action globally is the Palestinian BDS Movement: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

p.s. Boycott all fruits, vegetables, and wines produced in Israel

p.p.s. Tim Hortons (up in Canada) is a sister company to Burger King, who are supplying meals to Israeli soldiers. The Parent Company to both restaurants, Restaurant Brands International, also owns both Popeye's Chicken and Firehouse Subs as well.

Very happy to hear Henry kissingdirt is dead, wish it was murder

i was really hoping the story about the decomposing babies would be revealed to be slightly less horrible than it is but human rights watch just confirmed it which is making me sick

the doctors left five children behind at al-rantisi (also known as al-nasr) hospital because it was being targeted by the IDF. the hrw report says it was targeted by airstrikes—testimony from a nurse who left there says they were forced to leave the babies under shelling and also rounds of live ammunition by the army to evacuate the hospital. there was also testimony that at least one parent of one of the children left behind was shot and left at the entrance of the hospital

this was a testimony from one of a doctors without borders nurse after they were forced to evacuate.

i distinctly remember another written testimony by a doctor stating that they had left the five children behind at the ICU, and that they had informed the israeli army and asked for them to be evacuated but were specifically asking the red cross to intervene. there is also video testimony of a doctor asking the red cross to intervene before the hospital was evacuated.

one doctor explicitly stated that they had rehooked a child to one of the remaining battery-powered machines before leaving.

this was november 10th.

on november 28th, during the ceasefire, families were finally able to go back to north gaza and get into the hospital, only to discover that the five children left behind had been left to die and were found decomposed in their beds.

from AFP:

there's been an outpouring of anger at the red cross, which was the only international entity capable of intervening. instead, the red cross claimed it was not responsible for evacuating the hospital. they have not provided any assistance to thousands of palestinians in north gaza who were asking for help. the red cross released this statement:

However, their statement in Arabic was far worse, translated here:

"Our teams did not make any commitment to participate in these processes" essentially means the red cross (the only entity capable of evacuating a hospital the israeli military had beseiged) had simply abdicated its duties.

for comparison, because of the public outrage at al-shifa where 39 NICU babies were also beseiged by the israeli military, the red cross was involved in transporting the remaining babies to egypt after eight had already died. the red cross is capable of it, they just didn't care.

worth noting that since then israel has left al-shifa after filming some humiliating propaganda videos proving there was no "hamas headquarters" at the hospital and left al-nasr after finding nothing as well. this is not because the idf failed to find hamas, it's because the idf had succeeeded in its primary goal to make gaza unlivable and prevent palestinians from being able to access healthcare. finding hamas was never a real goal, and anyone who repeats this lie is either an idiot or a propagandist.

destroying a hospital and evacuating patients and medical staff is already a war crime. but leaving five children to slowly die alone of suffocation in a hospital bed and then leaving their dead bodies to decompose for over two weeks is unforgivable. this is what occupation does, what israel does. a war crime committed first by soldiers carrying arms, and then completed by international aid organizations that abandon palestinians in their time of need. it is not possible without international complicity allowing israel to continue committing unspeakable horrors against palestinians with impunity.

and today, december 1st, the ceasefire ended and bombing gaza has resumed.

Seeing articles and videos about “Israel” arming settlers reminds me of the stories my great grandpa told me about May 8th 1945. How France armed the settlers so they would help the colonial authorities kill Algerians. 45000 Algerians were killed in just a couple days and many more were jailed without proper trial.

The general who organized the massacre said to France “I got you 10 years of peace. But things need to change in Algeria, they failed only because the protests were not simultaneous. The calm is back only in surface, the gap between the two communities deepened. You cannot keep on using violence if you want to keep Algeria and your methods need to change.”

He was right (still a peace of shit cause dude organized the massacre of 45000 Algerians). France didn’t listen to him and 9 years and a half later on November 1st 1954 the Algerian war of liberation started with simultaneous attacks all over the North of Algeria. It started with 1000 men only and 8 years later Algeria was free of French colonial rule.

That’s why I’m convinced that Palestine will be free because Israel is repeating the same mistakes France did. My grandpa keeps telling me that he trust Palestinians to take back their land because that’s the natural order of things and because “Israel” reminds him so much of France. The methods, the lies, the propaganda. And just like Algerian women managed to show to the world what was truly happening and switched the public opinion, Palestinian journalists are showing to the world what’s happening. It cannot be ignored.

Pro Israel aholes reached the point where they have to disguise their protests as protest against antisemitism in order to gather any form of support from the public. Western medias already lost all credibility to the point where they are backtracking a bit. Politicians are backtracking slowly too. Because they are realizing that if they keep up the unconditional support they will fall with Israel (tbh I think they are all falling with Israel either way because whenever the Global South rise the West fall cause the West is unable to thrive without looting and oppressing the Global South.).

Palestine will be free in our lifetime Inch’Allah and we will all share pictures and videos of the liberation. Palestinians are going to rebuild their country and thrive. If Algeria kicked out colonizers after 132 years Palestine can do it because it’s a country of braves. Because nobody can stop a people who fight for liberation when the people are united.

2009 y'all. Fuck sake

TW: death, child death, mass murder, corpses (they're blurred)

i want to reiterate i don't think israeli hostages have had the time of their lives and i don't think this ordeal was fun or easy for them but looking at how israeli hostages have been released by hamas and how palestinian hostages have been released by israel is a really dark-sided reality check on just how low the standards for israel have been to meet a basic threshold for humanity and yet it still failed

The Palestinians being released aren't hostages... they're charged or convicted prisoners

this is of course, not true. more than two-thirds of the prisoners released have not been convicted of any crime, and include those were not charged with anything at all.

even in the pdf released by the israeli government, compiled by journalist laura adkins, you can see most were arrested as minors and charges include "throwing stones" and "support for terrorism" and "threatened area security." Vox reports: "Since 1967, Israel has issued over 1,000 military orders that criminalize a range of activities in Palestinians’ daily lives, including waving political symbols like flags, being in certain areas without permits, and any kind of speech that can fit into a loosely defined charge of “incitement.” Citing decades of evidence, the Amnesty report outlined an “intentional Israeli policy to detain individuals, including prisoners of conscience, solely for the non-violent exercise of their right to freedom of expression and association, and punish them for their views.”

however, under israel's administrative detention even the more serious charges are held under "secret evidence" that israel does not allow many defendants nor their lawyers to access (when it allows them access to lawyers). in order to convict israel then holds trials in military courts without adequate representation, forces children who can't read hebrew to sign off on documents they don't understand and has a ~99% conviction rate. it extracts confessions under duress including torture of minors, withholds adequate treatment from injured detainees, often uses threats of arresting family members (particularly parents) to coerce confessions from children, without mentioning the habitual illegal use of punitive measures such as solitary confinement for years on end.

it is a separate legal system designed to strip palestinians of due process. israel is one of very few countries in the world to routinely charge minors and non-violent political prisoners in military courts. anyone remotely familiar with incarceration and remotely familiar with practices of administrative detention in the middle east knows exactly what kind of legal procedure this is, so this comment fully relies on the willful ignorance of outsiders. in layman terms, this is called a kangaroo court. here's a handy graphic that illustrates it:

and to help you visualize this on the ground, there is no shortage of images of how israeli occupation soldiers have treated palestinian children (on their own land, in their own supposed territory) across the years:

of course the argument goes "these children were terrorists" and so on and so forth but this 2015 report from amnesty highlights exactly how specious these accusations of "stabbing" and "attempted murder" can be under israeli occupation:

we've also seen the case of ahmed erakat, who was accused of trying to drive a car into a checkpoint and executed on the spot when forensic examination revealed otherwise. similarly, the case of israa jaabis who was accused of trying to detonate a bomb at an israeli checkpoint, while her family maintains that israeli forces firing indiscriminately at her car after an airbag malfunction caused a cooking gas tank to explode, leaving her disfigured after israeli soldiers left her to burn on the ground.

however, whether or not they charged or convicted actually doesn't matter. israel has no right nor authority to imprison or detain palestinians outside the occupied west bank under international humanitarian law. but it is israel's own high court of justice that gives it the legal pretext to do so under claims of security threat, which amnesty international and multiple other human rights groups have repeatedly found in violation of international humanitarian law. through legal loopholes such as expanding the territory and language of what constitutes "military zones" israeli soldiers in the west bank are given free reign to terrorize the population and simultaneously protect their illegal settlement expansion. there is some leeway for appeal that provides a veneer of legitimacy to this process, but it is overwhelmingly a fascist and unlawful system.

as one report points out, allowing real due process to palestinians who are accused of attacking occupation soldiers would then have to confront the legality of the occupation itself, which palestinians have the right to resist by any means necessary under international law (and under which soldiers and armed settlers are a credible and justified target.)

israel instead awards legal impunity to such armed settlers & soldiers in these settlements who provoke and kill palestinians constantly while palestinian prisoners are charged under an apartheid law, rendering all accusations, charges and convictions as null and void as convictions under syrian or north korean courts, for example.

finally, i leave you with this anecdote, which sums up just about everything illustrated above:

now the irony of it all is that even if these were convicted prisoners under some semblance of real due process, the manner in which israeli authorities have policed their release by pre-emptively arresting members of their family and community, forcibly removing the press, banning all celebrations, shooting live ammunition and killing people awaiting their release, and breaking the arms of teenagers and leaving them untreated for days before release is still unjustifiable, which was the purpose of this post lol.

someday we'll have a conversation about how MEMRI-style (in fact a zionist think tank) translations have been deliberately utilized to dehumanize, decontextualize and misinterpret palestinians, frequently making perfectly normal translations from arabic sound like a biblical, inflammatory speech when it is just formal but not particularly notable phrasing

another form of violence that israel inflicts is being a colonial state but disguising coloniality through procedure: breaches of trust are "negotiations;" murders are "operations;" bantustans are "area b" and "area c;" meanwhile hamas commits "barbaric atrocities" etc

now interestingly i know in hebrew israelis speak with quite blatantly dramatic and inflammatory speech, but unlike palestine, israel has always had very strong english-speaking self-representation that translates both its language and its intention to suit its needs. palestinians have had no such privilege in the public and political spheres—and in fact did not—until scholars like edward said made an enormous push for it

but like one of the facets of this is that palestinians are responding to the same violence they've faced for 75 years. when they call israel "the enemy" it is not a particularly cartoonish phrase, it is the result of a people being caught off-guard by militias who suddenly had the support of the united nations. when palestinian resistance calls itself the resistance its not a fanciful term, it is because they are genuinely resisting an occupying force that patrols their everyday routes with machine guns. it is resistance in its purest form, liberation in its purest form, the exact usage these terms were conceived for in the first place. they are dealing with a colonial relic, cartoonish levels of oppression.

as a colonial vassal and a beneficiary of imperialism, israel has been allowed to progress alongside the first world, a start-up nation of drones and surveillance. palestinians have been forcibly kept in a suspended state of war since 1948. educated, yes, but politically and socially progressing from ethnic cleansing to military rule, to occupation, to blockade, to apartheid. their vocabulary has only expanded to include the offenses against them but has never needed to update because their conditions have never materially changed. they are colonized by an enemy that they are resisting. so of course they use the language that describes their plight most accurately.

palestinians call it as they see it, but israeli vocabulary disguises it, modernizes it, formalizes it. discursive violence, as always.

Really relevant right now. Despair and defeat is what they want you to feel - that's a colonial weapon in itself. So don't you dare fucking stop, turn your rage and grief into fuel that keeps you going.