Displaced over and over, the Al-Anqars are desperately trying to hold on. Their family of 14 (including two people over the age of 55, five children below the age of 10, and a baby) are struggling to survive in the demolished North as it is. In March, the Rafah border crossing is slated to reopen, allowing the family to escape this death and destruction. The fee is €5,000/person, to escape from this:
Please donate and share this post as much as possible to get the Al-Anqars to safety—THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO HELP THEM
This is part of my house before the war and the
great destruction.
All the walls have been demolished
life is no longer ours, it is in our name, and the earth is our land. How has life changed? We used to enjoy a decent and beautiful life. We have now become homeless, displaced between camps I feel a big gap between what the house used to be, its safety and warmth, and what my eyes see now! The amount of destruction of all kinds in this small place. You will find shells wherever you look. You will find rocket powder. You will find rubble, piled up stones, and painful dreams.! (You can contribute by donating to get us to safety outside.) attached in the
) We have reached a point where you are very lucky if you have a room left of the whole house that is not demolished
Your support is crucial to help me rebuild and ensure my family's safety and survival. Your contribution will replace my tools and restore our hope and creativity.
Your donations, no matter how small, will make a big difference in our lives. It will help us secure food and medicine and will give us the opportunity to survive and overcome this crisis. We need your support now more than ever.
🆘🆘
1100 sek= 100$
Every 5$ will make differance to save my life
I.
Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.
As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)
To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.
But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.
We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.
As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.
But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.
II.
I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.
At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.
Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.
However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.
One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.
In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)
Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.
When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.
/ Orv novel main story + epilogue spoilers
!! Please do NOT reupload my comics / works anywhere !!
"Did you know, Dokja-ssi?" - A Jung Heewon comic about platonic love
!! Please do NOT reupload my comics / works anywhere !!
(cont below)
Thank you @princess-of-purple-prose for the ID (available in ALT text). ID was rephrased here and there according to what the panels are meant to show
please donate if you can, also check out their YouTube channel, Motionwarrior <3
A Plea to Save My Family from the Horrors of War
Hello, my name is Ghada, I am 32 years old,
and I once lived a life full of hope and ambition.
As the bombing intensified and the violence escalated, we were forced to flee our beautiful home, which was completely destroyed, to the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. We lived in a small tent barely a few meters wide, but even that was not enough. We were forced to flee again to central Gaza, where we now live in a school for displaced people, moving from one place to another without knowing when this tragic journey will end 💔🏚️.
I also have two married brothers, Mohamed and Ahed, who live with us in the same displacement location with their children (Lama, Nabil, and Amir) and (Fatima, Eman, and Noor). The children, having lost their toys and games, have found some joy playing with the pets 🐾, trying to find happiness in the darkest of times.
But the bitter reality is that we are living in an uninhabitable environment. Diseases and insects are widespread, and sewage water floods the area around us. The children, who should be focused on learning and playing, now suffer from malnutrition and disease. Recently, the spread of the polio virus among them has only added to their pain and suffering 🦠😔.
All we hope for now is to find safety, to not die before we can escape or move to a safer place. But even that simple right seems impossible. We need your help to raise the money needed to cross the Rafah border between Gaza and Egypt, where the coordination cost for one person ranges between $5,000 and $7,000.
We are trying to hold on to hope 🌟, trying our best to find safety for ourselves and our children. With your support, we might just achieve that. Every share of this story, every donation, every bit of help can make a huge difference.
Please, help us raise our voices, and help us save our family 🙏💙.
GoFundMe campaign link 💔❤️ >>>
on their verified list, number 6.
✅ Verified campaign – please check the end of the story 🔍📌
I'm Anas Basil, a recent high school graduate with dreams of pursuing a degree in e-business management and building a career. However, due to my family's financial hardships, I enrolled at Khan Younis Training College (KYTC), affiliated with UNRWA. Sadly, the war has turned the college, once a beacon of hope and education, into a shelter for displaced families, stripping it of its educational purpose.
I completed high school with a 93% average, filled with excitement about continuing my education and securing a job to support my family. But like so many others, the war has shattered those dreams.
My younger brother, Ahmad, is 14 years old and currently in the third grade of preparatory school. We’ve always called him "Doctor of the Future" because of his intelligence and natural talent in mathematics. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing war, he has been deprived of schooling for the second consecutive year. In addition to his academic abilities, Ahmad has a passion for football and used to win tournaments.
Our Life in Displacement: The war forced our family to flee to Rafah, where we lived in a tent for several months. Each day, my brother and I would wake up to fetch water, gather wood, and light a fire to prepare food. Survival became our daily task, but we never gave up hope. The conflict affected us deeply, but it did not extinguish our dreams of education and a better future.
We are seeking €29,000 to help Ahmed and me leave Gaza, continue our education. More importantly, it will allow us to support our family, who have been deeply affected by the harsh conditions and skyrocketing costs of living due to the ongoing war in Gaza.
We've outlined how your donations will make this possible. You can find all the details in the campaign link below.
Your contribution will not only help us escape the war-torn reality we live in but also give us the opportunity to rebuild our futures.
Every donation, no matter the amount, brings us one step closer to our goal.
With deepest gratitude, Anas & Ahmed
tagging for reach:
@90-ghost @heritageposts @gazavetters @neechees @butchniqabi @fluoresensitive @khanger @autisticmudkip @beserkerjewel @furiousfinnstan @xinakwans @batekush @appsa @nerdyqueerr @butchsunsetshimmer @biconicfinn @stopmotionguy @willgrahamscock @strangeauthor @bryoria @shesnake @legallybrunettedotcom @lautakwah @sovietunion @evillesbianvillain @antibioware @akajustmerry @dizzymoods @ree-duh @neptunerings @explosionshark @dlxxv-vetted-donations @vague-humanoid @buttercuparry @sayruq @malcriada @sar-soor @northgazaupdates2 @feluka @dirhwangdaseul @jdon @ibtisams @sawasawako @memingursa @schoolhater @toesuckingoctober @waskuyecaozu @a-shade-of-blue @c-u-c-koo-4-40k
We don’t have a home anymore, despite the signed contract agreement that made the house ours. We had an attorney that was supposed to halt the eviction, but suddenly disappeared and left us out for the birds. It’s really the landlord’s son who ended our stay at the house. He had the workers stuff our belongings in black garbage bags and toss them out to the street, breaking some things in the process, despite the officer telling me to my face when I was in panic, “We are professionals and will be careful with your items.”
One of the things that blew me away is that my dad (now battling cancer) volunteered as a first responder during our time here, and yet many in the neighborhood stopped by with comments or made fun of us, and what I think I understand is that because they know that we are artists and were always making the exterior of the house look pretty and well kept, they felt high enough to insult or make fun of our situation.
From overnight to the next day, frantically hustling and carrying/dragging our belongings, even bigger than us such as furniture and whatever was left of our stuff into a couple of moving trucks, the landlord’s son also called the cops on us multiple times since we had our “trash” on the property. He did this anyway even after watching us in the direct sun, going without eating, or taking breaks for several hours, desperate to collect our things and bring them off the property to safety in the midst of his request for the Town Garbage to dispose of our belongings. Literal blood, sweat, and tears were shed that day. He destroyed a lot of furniture that I remember taking a few years for my parents to save up for. I will never forget the sound my grand piano made when I watched it be lifted into the air and drop, shattering inside that larger dump truck. We suffered bruises, scratches/cuts (due to anonymous sharp items we couldn’t see in many bags), bug bites, poison ivy, and sunburns. We are even getting sick (such as testing positive for covid) due to going and sleeping at hotels to motels, inns, etc.
In November, the landlord’s son sent workers to remove/destroy our own plants, rare shrubs, self-built wooden planters, and other of our wood framing to “clean up” the yard. He also had them destroy and take down our fence that we built too, which was supposed to enhance my brother’s safety, as he can’t help himself suffering from Asperger’s/autism. The house was poorly constructed, in which my Dad (battling cancer), has been making improvements and repairs to the house throughout the years. The lease shows that we were on a “pay to own” plan, which we've already invested for around 15 years... We paid out of pocket and were very rarely compensated to fix any issues with the house, but kicked out anyway…
At this point, I am not looking to cover the cost to replace what was ruined or lost, but we are running out of resources, going from motels to hotels, while struggling to pay for storage, as well as any other form of shelter.
Unfortunately, we live in a relatively expensive part of New York, and it would be a lot of gas to inspect houses and meet with real estate agents, including bringing our things from the storage units to the new location even if we found a more affordable, well built house in another state. I would especially like my little sister to continue her education here as well, but the market for homes here aren’t in a very sparing range.
Since middle school, it was always my biggest dream and concern to buy a house for my family; in fear that something like this would happen. I have tried so hard to find ways to make it happen, but around where I live, these corporations are either not hiring, or I am believed to be inadequate for the job, even though I applied to many fields I’ve had experience and felt confident in.
I would like to secure a final place for my family. FULLY paid off. No longer needing to worry about the greed and control from heartless and unconcerned landlords, like the many years ago growing up, and now.
Your help and contribution is abundantly appreciated.
-Rachel ( aka MW ) ❤️❤️❤️
If Anya’s role-swap name is Agent Starlight while Loid’s is Agent Twilight can Yor’s spy name be Agent Midnight or Eclipse
Welcome ♥️
I hope you are well too I am 👍
Muhammad from Gaza, my father Three children I write to you with a heavy heart and an urgent request for help. My family is in a very dangerous situation due to the ongoing war, and I have started a GoFundMe campaign to save them. Can you please share my campaign post from my profile? Every share can be a lifeline for my family. 🙏 Feel free to share it on any other social media platform if you wish.🇵🇸🍉❤️🍉
“𝘉𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘣𝘰𝘢𝘳𝘥, 𝘊𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘬𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴.”
298 posts