Hello, friends and enemies. Another fortnight, another blog post! Today I’m coming in hot with some opinions, but there are snow cones and cat photos if you make it to the end.
Livestreamed Apocalypse
Content warning: the saddest shit in the world
The bleakest thing of all time has been happening on Tumblr. Basically every day, I get direct messages and/or tagged in random posts from people allegedly trying to survive in Gaza. They are begging for money. The messages are almost identical, no matter who sends them, although we have moved through a few iterations of the formula over the last year. Here’s a post I was tagged in this week.
To me, this post is obviously a scam. It goes on to provide a GoFundMe link, which all of these posts do, but the weird tone and emoji use seems to me like someone trying to get attention and rile us up emotionally so we’ll send money without thinking. I have to say that grifting based on a fucking genocide is the most ghoulish possible choice. There are people out there running legitimate fundraisers to escape disaster but I am sure this isn’t one of them. I’ve received countless messages/been tagged in countless posts just like this in which people are trying to take advantage of the overall generosity and community spirit present among Tumblr users. It’s wearing on me.
In contrast, here’s a direct message I received this week that felt like a fucking gut punch.
It’s entirely possible that this was an extremely well-calculated spam message, but this seemed authentic to me. Whether or not it’s an actual person earnestly reaching out to an internet stranger, it certainly feels real. This is the first time out of the many messages I’ve received that I have responded and donated a little to their fundraising campaign. I don’t know if it will help them survive. I’m not even entirely certain that it’s not a scam, but even if it is, I am at least trying to help. This made me think of when I was growing up in the Mormon church and adults would talk about helping homeless people. The prevailing wisdom was you shouldn’t just give out money willy-nilly because they might buy drugs or alcohol and you wouldn’t want to be financing a sin. Instead, you should pop into the nearby grocery store and buy them something to make sandwiches with to give to them. It’s a very condescending approach to helping people in need that prioritizes the giver’s feelings over the recipient’s needs. All this to say, if this does happen to be a scam, it’s none of my business. My heart was in the right place.
I want to be clear that I don’t think receiving upsetting spam messages trying to separate me from my funds is the bleak part of this story (that might seem obvious, but we are on the internet: the bad-faith discourse machine). It’s bleak that Palestinians are being subjected to a genocide and no one seems willing or able to do a damn thing about it. Because it’s easier to understand horrors and agree that they were horrible when we’re seeing them in the rearview mirror: Imagine we had cell phones during World War II and you’re getting text messages from strangers who are desperately contacting any live account saying things like “They put my whole family on the train. Please help me find them,” or “I need to get out of Poland before it’s too late.” They’re going through the worst things a person can experience, but it is still a high psychic toll to bear witness and having next to nothing you can do about it. Every day I come on the internet and get bombarded with suffering, even when I’m not looking for it. I would love to go a week without seeing a photo of a starving child in Gaza. I would love even more for children in Gaza to not be starving.
In October 2023, I started learning more about the issues between Israel and Palestine and wrote that it’s just not that complicated. It’s now almost two years later and I feel confident in saying it is now even less complicated. For example, earlier this month, Israel’s cabinet ministers “approved plans … for its forces to capture the entire Gaza Strip and remain in the territory for an unspecified amount of time.” Yes, and where will the people living there go? I wonder. Another dire issue is that Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid. Israel has admitted only a fraction of the trucks with supplies into Gaza, prompting the UN Secretary-General to call this “the curellest phase of this cruel conflict” and note that the entire population is at risk of famine. The “freedom flotilla,” which was attempting to deliver aid by boat, was hit by drone strikes. We don’t know for sure that Israel sent the drones but like … who else? On May 20, the UN said “14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours if the aid does not reach them in time.” The same day, Netanyahu finally allowed a “handful” of trucks into Gaza and, CBS news notes, “he said he had been pressured into easing the total blockade by allies who could not tolerate ‘images of mass famine.'” I guess he’s able to tolerate these images just fine. After all, what’s a little famine when your army is “systematically forcing Palestinians to act as human shields in Gaza, sending them into buildings and tunnels to check for explosives or militants.”
Meanwhile, my country continues to bankroll the genocide, and apparently never even tried to stop it. Middle East Monitor reported this last month:
Former Israeli ambassador, Michael Herzog, made a startling admission about Biden’s support: “God did the State of Israel a favour that Biden was the president during this period. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.” His remarks encapsulated a broader sentiment that the White House gave Benjamin Netanyahu all the political space he needed to execute the military offensive, which has claimed the lives of more than 52,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children.
“Biden never pressured Israel for ceasefire, as Israeli officials boast of exploiting US support” by Nasim Ahmed in Middle East Monitor on April 29, 2025
Biden of course was at least not so gauche as to share an “AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a Dubai-style paradise.” Trump, as is his custom, said the quiet part out loud. The U.S continues to send an absurd amount of money to Israel. IMEU reports that the U.S. government has appropriated nearly $18 billion for Israel’s military, and “[a]nother $20 billion in weapons transfers to Israel was approved by the Biden administration in August 2024.” On March 1 of this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.” This probably isn’t an exhaustive list of recent contributions, but I’m not looking up every single gift to Israel that’s happened this year. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., research was published this month stating that the “bottom 60% of nation’s earners hold just 22% of disposable income but need 39% for a minimal quality of life.” Savvy readers may note that 60 percent is also the majority of the country. The average household is earning “$38,000 per year, falling more than $29,000 short of the MQL [Minimal Quality of Life].” I remain sickened and mad as fuck that our tax dollars are financing a genocide while the majority of people in this country cannot afford to live. The wanton disregard for human life in Gaza is terrible on it’s own but it feels awful that I’m paying for it, even if just a small part. Even worse, that money could be paying for health care, schools, libraries, and other essential services. Instead we’re mortgaging our society to finance death.
I wish there was more that we could do as individuals to stop this. Short of a tax strike or we all chain ourselves to our Senators’ offices and refuse to leave until they do something, I don’t know. The hard part is that we are all trying to survive too (with 22% of the available disposable income, as previously noted), and you can’t do anything that would risk your job because then you have no health insurance (greatest country in the world!). I’ve written previously about trying to divest my 401(k) from war as much as possible, which is not easy. In response to that, one of my friends told me about Natural Investments, which has financial advisors focused on investing your money in a way that isn’t directly harming the world. You do have to have a certain amount of money to work with most of the advisors though, so this isn’t an answer for everyone. There’s also the BDS movement, which has a targeted list of companies to boycott. Maybe some of you can even find a way to work in some of these simple sabotage for the 21st century suggestions.
Humans have always committed atrocities against other groups of humans. Seeing it play out in real-time on our pocket-sized computers doesn’t make it any worse, but it does force us to consider how we react to atrocity as a global society. It’s much harder to be ignorant of a live-streamed genocide than it was 500 years ago when you’d have to wait months for merchants and news to make their way across the world. What responsibility do we have to people we’ve never met and never will meet?
Books and Other Words
Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taia is a novel translated from French by Emma Ramadan (I assumed that first that this was translated from Arabic but it’s not!) The story is about Malika, a Moroccan woman living through the aftermath of French colonization. This short novel is divided into three chapters that focus on different stages of her life as she tries to eke out something for herself in this difficult world. Her first husband goes to fight for the French in Indochina and dies and her second husband is made out to be an idiot but she has nine children with him. In the last chapter, she’s confronted by a friend of her youngest son who is recently released from prison. The author uses the book to explore how hard it is to be a poor woman and what kinds of things one might do to survive, even if her kids think her choices were terrible. It’s also about the toll of having to keep one’s queerness private. Malika isn’t gay, but her first husband is and so is one of her sons. Despite her own struggles and suffering, she can’t manage to acknowledge this particular form of life being difficult. In short: life kind of sucks and everyone is doing the best they know how.
Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd is another Lavender Library find. Ackroyd charts London’s history with queerness from the earliest records to the city and the information is fairly interesting but it read more like a series of articles or blog posts than a book. It didn’t feel like there was any kind of unifying narrative or point of view. Still, I picked up a few “fun” facts abotu the origin of gay stereotypes, like that the ancient Greeks were describing homosexuals as having “loose” wrists way back when. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
The sequel to Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera, Space Oddity, is just as madcap as its predecessor. Space Oddity picks up shortly after the events of Space Opera with Decibel Jones on a press tour after scoring high enough in the Metagalactic Gran Prix (the galaxy’s answer to Eurovision) to prove that humans are sentient and thus avoid the destruction of our species. As you might imagine, hijinks ensue. While I loved the first book, I thought this one was just okay. I really enjoy Valente’s nutty, Douglas Adams-esque style, but this book had a lot of just explaining different aliens. It makes sense and it’s important to the story, but it seemed like it required so much exposition scattered throughout the story.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- against the fleeing to europe industrial complex via the late review. From the article, “First of all, I am inherently wary of anything that speaks me in a breathless language of fear. As a woman, I am somewhat inured to being sold things by way of anxiety, though I realize not everyone is. I’ve spent a lifetime having my most intimate fears be seen as fair game for clicks, attention, spectacle, and weaponization. If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated. Hence, it does not surprise me to see that many of these posts purporting to “help you” vis a vis fear are instead selling something: consulting services, affliate links, financial planning resources, access to insider information, guidebooks, a community, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why, throughout any given Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex essay, the tone often changes, bit by bit, from fear to the ersatz reassurance of self help. I did it and so can you.“
- From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty via Organizing My Thoughts. I really liked this piece on what prevents people from being the kind of person they want to be in a terrible historical moment, and what we can do about it. We’re all beleaguered by the need to survive but there are still ways we can participate in activism despite the grind.
- ‘Somebody needs to do it’ via Taylor Lorenz on YouTube. This video takes a look at the “somebody needs to do it” memes. What is “it”? Well … we shan’t say (just kidding, it’s people wishing Trump was no longer alive). Lorenz goes beyond the meme and explains how this level of nihilism took hold. She links the current mood to what we went through early in the covid pandemic and how the government’s lack of effort to keep us healthy and safe has brought us here.
- The Era Of The Business Idiot via Where’s Your Ed At? This essay is very long but don’t let that deter you because it is good. In this piece, Zitron coins the term “business idiot,” which he defines as “a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society” and goes on to say that “neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.” I could quote half the article here and still not be satisfied so I highly recommend reading it.
Media
At my request, Kirk got me this great little handheld emulator for my birthday. It’s a little like a GameBoy but it has a few thousand classic video games on it, no game cartridges needed. One game that caught my eye was Cool Spot, which is a Super Nintendo game we had when I was a kid. I don’t know where this game came from because it’s clearly kind of an extended 7-up commercial. I remembered it being very difficult. In retrospect, the game is somewhat difficult but actually mostly badly designed. You should be able to see the next platform you’re supposed to jump to in a game, rather than just be taking blind leaps of faith. That said, it’s still fun overall and I did finish it, which was cathartic; I never thought it could be done. However, the final screen basically said “you finished, but you didn’t really beat the game.” Well. Too bad. I will not be goaded into playing it again.
Eurovision
Austria won Eurovision and we’re all grateful. The final two came down to Austria and Israel, despite widespread discontent with Israel’s participation in the contest. One theory I saw is that, because there are so many countries people can vote for, one focused voting bloc can significantly effect the public vote tallies. It also seems that Israel paid for ads online encouraging people to vote for their song. This is gauche at best. Some broadcasters are calling for the voting system to be examined after Israel ran away with the public vote this year.
I’m glad Israel didn’t win because I would absolutely not have gone to Israel to see Eurovision. More and more artists, including this year’s winner, and even some countries are speaking out against Israel’s participation in Eurovision, which makes sense. Russia is banned while they’re warring against Ukraine, so why isn’t Israel prevented from laundering its reputation while it’s conducting a genocide against the Palestinian people? Spain’s Prime Minister has publicly noted this “double standard” and stated that Israel should be excluded, and two Belgian government ministers have also voiced concerns. Who knows if this will lead to any changes, but we do know that Eurovision is being tightly edited so we don’t hear all the boos and protests whenever Israel’s representative is on stage. The irony of all this is noted in one damning opinion piece that stated, “If Eurovision were to expel Israel now, it would be the harshest penalty the continent has ever imposed on the nation – and it would be not for mass killing, but for meddling with pop music.” Not wrong!
The politics of Eurovision aside, I ended up being wrong predicting Estonia as a winner, but they did get third place so I wasn’t too far off. Austria’s song by JJ, like last year’s winning song by Nemo, featured operatic elements. I can only conclude that Europe yearns for the opera.
We’re planning a trip to Austria to see Eurovision next May! We don’t know the specific city or dates yet, so much of the planning is currently theoretical. I didn’t realize I was going to have this reaction—though perhaps I should have—but as soon as I saw that Austria won, I was like “I’ll have to learn some German.” Because I’m insane, this has quickly spiraled into “How much German can I learn in just one year?” I understand, intellectually, that I don’t have to learn German to go to a country whose official language is German, but it certainly feels polite to do so. And you all know that I live for this shit.
I’ve currently started the German course on Mango languages, which is an app that the Sacramento Public Library offers for free. So far, it does seem like a good program. I like that it has audio and it introduces several terms then gradually asks you to recall them and combine them into various sentences. It seems like an effective structure. I also found a few textbooks online, which is good because I like to get the explicit grammar instructions (which is not something a language learning app normally offers). The hard thing is going to be balancing learning something new with maintaining my Spanish and Icelandic. Well, I’m less worried about the Spanish. Starting a language feels very fun and exciting because you know nothing so it feels like you’re constantly making discoveries and seeing progress, which is not how it feels at a the terrible intermediate stage (me in Icelandic), or at the advanced stage (me with Spanish), but at least at an advanced stage, I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and read or watch videos in the language. So far I can already talk about the weather and comment on the quality of a hotel breakfast in German, though little else. I also laughed when I learned that the phrase “it is” literally translates to “it’s giving.” Given current trends in slang, this makes every sentence that starts with es gibt very funny.
Corporeal Form
I, and probably most of you, tend to think of anxiety that originates from the brain. However, as I’ve gradually addressed my many bodily ailments, I’ve realized that my anxiety is often originating from the body, not the mind. On Wednesday, I was starting to feel anxious and restless and I was wondering if I needed to go run around to wear myself out. That usually works to calm the mind but it is hot and I didn’t really feel like running around. It eventually occurred to me that I was feeling bad in the body. My carpal tunnel is getting worse and my hand had been bothering me all day. My jaw hurt because I foolishly ate some too-crusty bread that morning. Holding my body up was also tiring, as usual. Until recently I was not able to identify these distinct body sensations. It was just “I feel bad” or “I’m tired” and vague unease. I think peeling back issue after issue has made it possible now to feel the individual problems, which is good. However, I am once again questioning how I fucking made it this far in life without being a total wreck.
Moving It
My dance recital is coming up! I’ll be performing in ballet, jazz, and tap and I’m sure you won’t want to miss it. It’s on May 31st in Elk Grove and tou can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts.
Kitchen Witchery
I wasn’t sure that I would make much use of the snowcone machine but I am fast becoming the mayor of snowcone city. My current favorite is the Icee-brand cherry syrup, which is simple but effective and certainly easier than leaving my house to buy a slushie on a hot day. I am starting to experiment with other types of shaved ice. I froze some chocolate soy milk and ran that through the ice-shaving contraption then drizzled some caramel on top. It does kind of look like dog food (Kirk said, “sure, dog food“) but it tasted good. It wasn’t as refreshing as the regular water-based shaved ice though. In actual food, on Friday I made a lasagna, garlic bread, and roasted green beans. You just can’t go wrong with cheesy noodles.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
