as you may know, israel has begun its ground operation in rafah. they dropped leaflets last night ordering people to evacuate, and bombing in east rafah has already begun.
The border is about to become unreachable.
Rafah is trapped.
We have literal hours until no-one, all the GoFundMe's you've scrolled past, all the people desperately begging on TikTok, will be able to escape.
Give now. Give whatever you can.
I am fundraising for the Odeh family, which is only 3k away from meeting its goal.
you will not get another chance.
Hello, my name is Jaafar from North Gaza. I previously created a GoFoundMe donation campaign, and when I got $2,400, they deleted the campaign without knowing the reason. Please support me in my new campaign, Chuffed. Any amount you donate, even if it is small, will help buy flour and vegetables for my family. The price of everything we have is many times its normal price. Please help save my family from starvation! 🥹🙏
https://chuffed.org/project/helpjaafar
I'm Abdelrahman, 22 years old. My journey has been marked by loss and resilience. When I was 18, my father passed away from COVID-19. Determined to build my own future, I pursued an education in multimedia technology, balancing my studies with work to cover my expenses. I was preparing to establish my home and life.
My mother: the princess whom we strive to make happy and satisfy. ❤️️
However, the war in Gaza, especially in the north, brought devastating tragedy. My home, university, job, and family were all destroyed in the conflict. While my family moved to the south, I was in the north, facing famine and moving from place to place, trying to survive.
Our street used to be lively and full of people, but it is no longer like that.
I have witnessed countless difficult and painful scenes while escaping death multiple times. In northern Gaza, life is reduced to a cycle of fleeing from danger and searching for food amidst the rubble of destroyed homes.
I have survived many times,I was hit by a missile in previously destroyed house
My dream is to travel abroad with my mother and sister to continue my education and develop my practical skills. For the past eight months, I have been unemployed, focusing on self-improvement and hoping for a better future.
This is a slow fandom zone
None of that "Oh no they bomb-dropped all the episodes in a week 1 month ago, I'm late!" "The tag hasn't been active all week is the fandom dead?" "I only got a hundred shares the first hour no one cares about my art"
Slow down
Take a deep breath and slow down
Fandom is YOU. And me and everyone. If we doodle stick figures for a show that ended 30 years ago we aren't "late" or "doing too little", we're playing dolls in our own time and having fun with works of art that mean a lot to us
You can literally watch and engage with something that aired in 2004 as if it aired yesterday
If the tag hasn't been active for 14 months guess what? If YOU post there, it isn't dead. Literally you can talk about anything you want whenever you want there is no weird law against watching things that people aren't actively talk about
Let's be deranged about stories together
comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously
The war has entered its ninth month and everything is getting worse 💔
Please help me get my family out of there and protect them from war and bombing🙏🙏
Hey
I’m loving the new story if u can’t tell. 😔
With chapter 152, we have a glimpse into the tattoo on Takiishi and Endo's shoulders.
Let's disect it!
Breech-loading swivel gun – or Furanki (仏郎機砲, "Frankish gun") in Japanese (Turnbull, 2006) – was one of the first cannons used in Japan. Coming from the Portuguese, these early European models were either called ishibiya (石火矢) or furankihō (フランキ砲) (Gunsen History, 2019), the latter bears similarity with the gun's Chinese name "Folangji", which comes from the Turkish name "Prangi" or Turkic "Farangi" (Chase, 2003). This explains the "Frank" on the tattoo.
I was trying to see if the wheel in the tattoo has any other meanings, but as far as I know, it is simply the wheel of the cannon. The same structure can be observed from Nii Satoru's drawing of the cannon wheel with 4 main spokes and 4 additional, underlying spokes. (Most wheel symbols in Hinduism or Buddhism are eight-spoked wheels).
The right-most part of the tattoo appears to be the rings and the button at the base of the cannon. It is pretty similar to what we'd see with a top-down view of the plan below.
Note. From Oozutsu cannon Japan 16th century [image] by Unknown author. Wikimedia Commons, 2010. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oozutsu_cannon_Japan_16th_century.jpg
The illustration of the wolf was cleverly combined into the cannon. Its hind legs turned into the cannon base while its fur blended into the fire surrounding the cannon.
Wolves have many symbolic meanings, but here I believe Endo was trying to highlight Takiishi's fierceness. Takiishi is an untamed, lone wolf. He doesn't obey the rules; and Takiishi's world, as per Endo's explanation, has no one other than Takiishi (of course until Umemiya makes an entrance).
Japanese Ishibiya (石火矢) hand cannons are also early firearms in Japan and have made an appearance in the movie Princess Mononoke.
If you find Endo's explanation confusing, here's a more visualised version for it.
Takiishi Chika (焚石 矢)
焚 (taki): to burn, or anger. This character is made up of two 木 (trees) and one 火 (fire)
石 (ishi): stone, or rock
矢 (chika): arrow
Ishibiya (石火矢)
石 (ishi): stone, or rock
火 (bi): fire
矢 (ya): arrow, projectile
Occasionally, Furanki guns were also called Kuni-kuzushi by the Ōtomo clan, which means country destroyer (Gunsen History, 2019).
Kunikuzushi (国崩し)
国 (kuni): country, or nation
崩 (kuzu) し(shi): breakdown
References
Chase, K. W. (2003). Firearms : a global history to 1700. Cambridge University Press.
Gunsen History (2019). Taihō (大砲): Japanese Cannons and Artillery. Gunbai: Ancient Japanese Warfare. https://gunbai-militaryhistory.blogspot.com/
Turnbull, S. R. (2006). Samurai : the world of the warrior. Osprey
Unknown Author. (2010). Oozutsu cannon Japan 16th century [image]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oozutsu_cannon_Japan_16th_century.jpg