Spent 18 years rummaging through the empty streets of Belgrade's suburban areas only to find a pack of angry feral dogs and a desperate need for an escape route
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i want to be like the wind: no one ever sees me but they feel my presence

bloglikeanegyptian:

bloglikeanegyptian:

award-winning palestinian children’s illustrator baraa awoor writes:

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“what use is it to be an illustrator of children’s books when the world has sentenced the children of your country to the death penalty, to vanish, to genocide?”

some of baraa’s illustrations:

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this is an illustration for youssef, whose mother is remembered running desperately into the hospital asking if anyone had seen a “small white boy with beautiful curly hair, his name is youssef,” a description which was remembered by millions when she finally identified his body:

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this illustration is for young omar, who was hugging his little brother and teaching him how to repeat the shahada after him (a prayer spoken by muslims before their death) as he lay on his hospital bed:

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“we want a new year that doesn’t kill us or our children, we want it a year without blood, without screaming, without pain, we want a new attempt to get our lives back, or something that resembled our life, even if life is a lie we still cling to it, return life to us—a new year’s card unlike any other year:”

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baraa is currently fundraising to get her family of 12 out of gaza. she is a friend of mine and this is a reputable fundraiser, so please donate if you can. the egyptian government is currently charging upwards of 5,000 USD per person to get to cairo through the rafah border:

eagle-writes:

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Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning.

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triptihosmrti:

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“A real joy smoke” (22 July 1920)

Probably no pipe smoker in the world gets any more pleasure from smoking than the Serbian women. Nearly all the older peasant women carry their pipes and never outlook an opportunity to sit down and enjoy a good smoke. This old woman calls every few days to see her daughter who is a patient in the American Red Cross hospital in Belgrade. Always after making her visit she sits down outside the hospital and lights her pipe to think over the strange things she has seen in the American institution

gallusrostromegalus:

faewaren:

Nicknames: when you shorten someone’s name affectionately

Nicholasnames: when you elongate someone’s name affectionately

Nichard names: when you incorrectly elongate someone’s name for humorous effect.

horrorlesbians:

yippie!!! i have broken the cycle!!!! < is about to be trapped in a different loop

aheathenconceivably:

thinking about when i mentioned tom and jerry by title alone to my 65 year old father and his only response was to laugh REALLY hard and say “him and that fucking mouse..” while staring into the distance. and then the conversation was over

disease:

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“RAIN WITH NO FLOOR”
JOHN WESLEY // 1979
[acrylic on paper | 25 1⁄2 x 19 1⁄4"]

doctor-fluffy:

the-real-seebs:

followthebluebell:

i-was-today-years-old-when:

i learned about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn’t stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive. (x)

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i feel like this is selling her a bit short tbh.  It’s not like she was a random woman who decided to tape ‘whatever’ was on television.  She was a civil rights activist and archivist, who was extremely concerned about preserving history.  She believed that, by taping television, she would be preserving history EXACTLY as it was perceived at the time; she didn’t want the detail in the news to disappear with time.  And she was RIGHT.

Like I said, she didn’t just tape ‘whatever’ was on television.  It was extremely targeted towards news stations.  There were 8 VCRs running at all times in her home.  Her life—-and her family’s lives—-were centered around 6 hour blocks, since that was the amount of time that a tape would record for.  Her collections were also extremely organized. 

Archivists are the most amazing people.

thanks, @followthebluebell

I never hear that dimension of her taping this stuff. It makes me think of all the stuff that just vanished when websites go down.

how much history

athingofvikings:

athingofvikings:

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting–and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of “reversibility”, which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key–it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily–picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child’s play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code… at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, “Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?”

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It’s worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there’s a “Why not just call the phone numbers?” obvious plot hole that you’ve missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you’re writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

#this has wrapped back around to reaching someone who cares about security more than writing#like this kind of thing is EVERYWHERE#anyways @op drop the title

@demo-ness, here you go:

XQ