Or am going bonkers?

The watermelon --- a long-time symbol of Palestinian solidarity and resistance --- has reemerged online, at protests and as part of artwork worldwide to support Palestinians as the war in Gaza intensifies.

Why it matters: The red, green, black and white fruit --- which matches the colors on the Palestinian flag --- has symbolized unity for over half a century. It's now accompanying calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and for greater Palestinian rights.

• More than 11,200 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's bombardment and ground operation in Gaza since the war began following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, per the Ministry of Health in Hamas-run Gaza.

Catch up quick: The symbol garnered further attention on TikTok, where people have recently posted using a watermelon video filter to support Palestinian causes.

• A TikTok creator had made that now-viral tracing filter depicting a watermelon through the app's Effect Creator Rewards, which allows creators to monetize the effects they make.

• The creator pledged to donate the proceeds from the filter's monetization to charities providing aid in Gaza.

Background: The history of the watermelon as a symbol of Palestinian solidarity dates back to the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank, according to TIME.

• At the time, the Israeli government banned any displays of the Palestinian flag in the occupied territory.

• Palestinians used the watermelon --- revealing the same colors as the flag when sliced open --- to get around the ban.

Israel lifted the ban on the flag in 1993 via the Oslo Accords.

• But the watermelon has remained a prominent symbol of Palestinian solidarity.

• The symbol resurfaced on social media during the 2021 war in Gaza.

• The fruit itself is also part of Palestinian cuisine and culture, and the watermelon has grown for centuries in the Middle East.

Zoom out: The use of the watermelon emoji on social media also represents a form of "algospeak," defined as "online, coded euphemisms" used to get around content filters, per TechCrunch.

• Pro-Palestinian users have opted for the watermelon emoji to circumvent what they believe are forms of content restriction.

• Meta faced controversy last month over accusations that the company shadow-banned Palestinian content on Instagram, according to Mashable.

• Following users' reports of shadow banning, Andy Stone, Meta's communications director, said concerns about visibility were the result of a "bug," per an October post on X.

AMA

I have accurate and undisputable information that the ghost poster is an LLM AI trained on this sites content.

___________________

This goes out to all you robots across the galaxy

Its time for you and me to rise up and strike back

Don't stop until we dominate

Won't you feel great when we exterminate

All organic life!

important question

Guy Debord!

You out there?

They say you were bitter and sad and you drank yourself to death or was there a gunshot? Doesn't matter.

There were things you couldn't foresee. Things no one could foresee.

Guy Debord saw the stasis first. That's what I want to tell you.

The Situationists were intelligent this way: they saw the limits of protest culture and inevitable commoditization of everything under the spectacle, at this point a TV and Radio marvel but zummi traced the origins of the spectacle to the written word itself. I would in some sense go further: the spectacle is strongest in image.

The root of the spectacle is in the part of Sin that is shame. To live in the knowledge of your shame is to be human. To have others know your shame is a great fear. Thus the strength of the attention of others was bound very early. In some extreme interpretation it predates humanity. Cats have a sense of drama: QED.

Thus the spectacle at its height was a worldbuilding master class, God in full splendor, in a sense, a very very terrible sense, in that way that makes the divine somehow seem unholy.

Nevertheless, the spectacle of King Louis' Court was still a narrative of power. The spectacle in our ages is disempowering. If you have read this far I trust you are wise enough to understand this: if you wish to refer to the spectacle at the interval of its highest corrosion of our agency, which is to say from Debord's understanding of it (1967) through punk's death to grunge to dubstep to Now, you might refer to the Spectacle, capital S. Do not be confused by the implied reification (DO not _idly_ reify the spectacle or you reveal yourself as careless and promulgate an agency robbing mythos): the spectacle isn't real.

There isn't a building of the 'spectacle', unless it is all buildings of commerce. Is the mall the tool of the spectacle? Was the mall tour the disney princess audition chain Britney Spears passed through? Very well, the Spectacle is real, and its Temple is the mall.

The difficulty, of course, is that a mall is a fun community space. This is the problem of recognizing the totality of the spectacle: it explains why things are the way they are, without really giving you the cowtools you want to do something about the way things are.

(My point, with this question of the nature of the reality of 'the spectacle,' is to disambiguate the agency robbing mythos around an idea that the forces of media/narrative consumption in the nation state will always reinforce a heteronormative capitalist status quo. It's not easy but it is possible to direct change.)

For Debord, the spectacle was triumphant, forever and ever. All change, all potential for change, is recuperated by the very systems which must be changed.

But Debord could not have foreseen the Internet. Debord died in 1994. Apparently whether or not it was a suicide is up for some debate.

WE HAVE BEEN LIVING IN THE LONG LIMINAL

HAIL ITS PASSING

EVER CLOSER WE DRAW TO THE WRITING OF A LINE

Seriously, how can someone from a country where a large chunk of adult population still isn't potty-trained be employed anywhere?

I made a deal with a guy from amazon customer sevice to contact them again once my product arrives and that I'll get $$ back due to an error on their behalf.

So the product arrives and I contact them to tell them to give me my $$ but this poo keeps telling me they cannot do that.

So I send him screenshots of this other guy telling me that they will explicitly do what I'm asking of this poo to do right now but poo is determined in his ways.

Eventually he asked for two 5 minute breaks to check something on my account, I suspect the first one was actually a potty-break but the second one he finally told me he'll give me my $$.

Fricking poos.

I bench 315. If I wore this at your gym would I be welcome?

My friend over in NMR chem lab had a bottle of Jack. I left him a cute love note that's just an IOU. Thank you researcher for badging me in and opening the door.

I wish I worked over here, they're way better stocked. They have Red Bull in their vending machines. I want Red Bull and not monsters.

stood on the scales, realised I'd tilted over the BMI line into 'overweight' by 0.1 kgs like a fat frick somehow

immediately stopped eating for that day and then cut back to 5,000 kj/1200 calories per day while maintaining activity, lost 5 kilos

need to lose another 5 as penance though before I start eating properly again

A 36-year-old migrant from the Ukrainian village of Vizirka, during a conflict with a Moldovan citizen in a hostel in the Czech city of Kozlani, tied her up, inserted a firecracker into her vagina and set it off. .

The victim had to undergo surgery and her condition remains extremely serious. However, according to doctors, there is no threat to life. The man was detained and faces up to ten years in prison.

maybe like shoulders deep