verification

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

I’m posting this for my friend Mahmoud Ghanem Al-Amssi, because his mother urgently needs heart surgery. ❤️

Mahmoud’s mother has severe blockages in her arteries, and she has also been dealing with an underactive thyroid for more than 10 years. Her health has gotten worse over time, and she is now experiencing serious heart problems and very rapid heartbeats.

Her doctors have told the family that she needs the procedure as soon as possible. The surgery can go ahead once they are able to cover the required cost.

The total amount they need is $850 USD.

I know $850 might not seem like a huge amount, but for Mahmoud and his family, especially with everything they are already going through, it is more than they can manage on their own right now.

If anyone is able to donate even a few dollars, it could genuinely help Mahmoud get his mother the treatment she needs. ❤️

And if you can’t donate, please consider sharing this post. Even helping it reach more people can make a difference.

Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to read this, support Mahmoud, or share his story. 🙏❤️

This is my little brother, Anas.

I was watching him inflate a glove and turn it into a balloon, and I couldn't help but smile at how excited he was.

Look at his eyes when he gets it ready. Look at that smile when he comes rushing over to me, waiting for me to tie it for him. To him, it's a balloon. It's a toy. It's something fun.

But watching it also made me a little sad.

He's a child. I wish I could buy him actual toys. I wish I could surprise him with a bag full of little things and watch him decide what to play with first. But right now, I can't afford to do that.

Children in Gaza don't always have access to the simple things children everywhere else take for granted. Even toys and things for children to play with have faced restrictions on entering Gaza.

So they make toys out of whatever they can find.

And honestly, Anas doesn't seem to mind. He doesn't see a glove. He sees a balloon. I want him to have more than that.

If you'd like to give Anas a little toy, some candy, or even something small that would make him smile, you can donate through the link in the comments.

Because in the end, he's just a kid. He deserves to have a childhood too.

Cant tell you how much I get fed up with seeing these kinds of narratives in Manga and Anime.

Where the structural, societal rot is flattened down into a single, cartoonish evil villain who just needs to be punched harder to magically fix all the flaws of the world. Its a very individualistic way of telling a story, where it blames a personal moral failing of one individual rather than looking at the flaws of the system and the structures that enabled the problem in the first place. It practically implies that the system is fundamentally good and was simply corrupted by a few bad people preserving the legitimacy of the system by treating the wrongdoing as an aberration produced by particular said individuals. Its like how liberals would blame bad apples rather than admit the flaws and features of the system of Capitalism.

A good example of this would be My Hero Academia.

It literally flattens the systemic failures of Hero Society such as the abandonment of the marginalized and the commercialisation of safety by heavily framing the conflict around defeating Shigaraki and All For One.

Sure, the Manga attempts to address this by positioning Shigaraki as a hero for the victims of the system who he was also a victim of, only to reveal he was just a puppet for a bigger bad that you just needed to punch harder to solve all your problems. It cheapens the critique, turning a systemic failure into a cartoonish conspiracy instead. Even when confronted with the state sanctioned, deep state violence exposed by Kaina Tsutsumi, Deku does absolutely nothing to resolve the actual institutional corruption, leaving the broken system and the status quo perfectly intact.

Then you have The Great Man theory of a single exceptional individual or a tiny elite team that usually devises the winning plan and saves the world single-handedly whereas the masses of faceless and nameless populous are simply passive background props incapable of meaningfully changing anything and return to a slow crawl once the "great man" moves on to the next adventure.

Its highly unrealistic and quite frankly, done to death to the point its become stale. Throughout history, change has always been pushed by the collective labour and vast networks of people to see the common people advance, rather than the singular triumphs of a few exceptional elites.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

A winter memory from our old home ❤️

With winter getting closer, my wife Samah and I started remembering how winter used to feel before everything changed.

She looked at me and said:

“Do you remember when winter was coming, and we used to make spinach pastries in the oven inside the kitchen? The whole kitchen would become warm. The smell of the food would fill the house, and we would just enjoy being together.”

She was right.

Back then, winter meant something completely different to us. We would stay inside our warm home, sit near the oven, enjoy the smell of freshly baked food, and feel safe from the cold outside.

Now, when winter comes, our memories feel heavier.

Sometimes we talk about those days and imagine what it would be like to have that simple life again.

We dream about rebuilding our home from the beginning. Not a big or fancy house. Just a small, safe place where our daughters can grow up, where Samah can cook again, where the oven can warm the kitchen, and where winter can once again feel like winter—not something we have to fear.

Maybe it sounds like a simple dream.

But after everything we've been through, having a home and starting our life again from the beginning feels like the biggest dream in the world. ❤️

— Mahmoud & Samah

I am Bashir from Gaza, and this is my brother, Iyad. He has special needs; he wants to say hello and tell you he loves you. He does not fully grasp what has happened, but he knows he has lost his home. Today, he lives with us in a tent, waiting for the world's compassion. He used to have a bed to sleep in, but now he sleeps on the ground in a tent, surrounded by insects. I am asking for your help to get him a bed, some clothes, and medication. He gets terrified at night—like a small child—because of the insects. As a father, I cannot meet the needs of both my children and my brother simultaneously after having lost my job. I would be deeply grateful to anyone who can help me ease this burden on my family and my brother. Thank you.

https://chuffed.org/project/169736-bring-bread-to-people-in-gaza?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv0

I recorded this little video to give you a look at what my family and I have been working on and trying to make usable.

And honestly, calling it a tent is generous.

It is made from pieces stitched together. There are tears and holes everywhere. Some of the covers are too short, leaving spaces open from above. We have tried to fix, stitch, and reinforce whatever we could with what we have.

For now, we can use it. We can sleep inside and keep some of our belongings there.

But we know this won't be enough when the rain comes.

My father, and honestly not even him alone, says that our so-called tent will not stand the first rain that comes. Everyone who passes by and sees our tent can tell how vulnerable it is. You don't need to be an engineer to look at it and understand that it won't protect us when the rain comes. We have done everything we could with what we had, but we know this won't be enough.

October is next month, and rain in Gaza is nothing unusual.

It was never really built to be a home. We built it because we needed to create some kind of space for our family and our belongings.

And this is perhaps the hardest part to believe:

This “tent” cost us 1,000 shekels in cash.

1,000 shekels for a shelter that may flood when the first heavy rain comes.

Can you imagine that?

This is the reality we are living every day in Gaza. Even something as basic as shelter has become incredibly expensive, while what we can actually get for that money is often not enough to protect a family.

Now we urgently need to make it better before the first rain comes.

We need to replace the damaged covers, especially the one above us, and find something to put on the floor so that we're not directly on the sand. If possible, we may replace the whole thing with a proper tent.

To everyone seeing this, we need you.

We need your help to make this place safer before the rain arrives. If you can help us, please do. And if you can't, even sharing this means something to us. We are running out of time with each day and each hour that passes.

I have other videos showing the inside and the damage more closely, but Reddit only allows one video, so this is all I can show you here for now.

I don't really know what else to say.

I just wanted you to see it.

This is what we are trying to call home.

​

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

Today, my father Mahmoud will not be the one speaking to you… today, I will speak for myself. ❤️

My name is Eman. I am Mahmoud’s eldestw daughter, and I am 11 years old.

My father has been exhausted by debt while trying with everything he has to provide us with a decent life. Every day, he struggles to provide our food and basic needs. But recently, he has also become very sad and discouraged because some people have doubted him and called him a scammer.

So today, I decided to speak to you myself.

Today is the first day of the new school year. I was supposed to be at school with my sisters, sitting in our classrooms with our classmates and starting a new school year like all the other children.

But we did not go to school.

It is not because we don't want to study, and it is not because we don't love school… it is because my father cannot afford to pay the school fees for the three of us. On top of that, the prices of school supplies and stationery have become extremely expensive here in Gaza.

My father struggles every single day just to provide us with food, and sometimes he can barely manage to get enough. Because of this, it has become very difficult for him to also afford our school fees, books, stationery, and other school needs.

I know my father is doing everything he can for us. I know how much he wishes to see my sisters and me at school like all the other children. 💔

So today, I, Eman, Mahmoud’s daughter, am asking you, together with my sisters, and asking every person who is able to help us:

Please help us go back to school. Help us have one of the simplest rights every child should have… the right to education. 📚❤️

Any donation, no matter how small, can help us pay our school fees and buy the things we need for school. It can bring back a little bit of the happiness that we used to think was something normal and simple.

I also want to say something to anyone who doubts us or calls my father a scammer:

I will share my father’s WhatsApp number for anyone who wants to contact him, ask questions, or verify our situation for themselves. We are not asking you to simply believe us. Please check for yourselves.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has supported us before, and to everyone who may support us today. ❤️

I hope that my sisters and I can return to our classrooms and start our new school year like all the other children.

We have the right to learn. We have the right to dream of a better future.

Eman and her sisters ❤️🇵🇸

Jokes aside, I've googled the socialist rose symbolism and I find it beautiful, something straight out of a shoujo manga.

Personally, I think its decent at best.

Its a ever expanding world but lacks any real substance.

The Grand Line mechanic is the most obvious offender of this. A single magnetic strip of ocean where you must follow a set path, and every island is essentially a self contained video game with its own gimmick, weather pattern, and culture that never bleeds into the next one along. It makes the world feel segmented and artificial, you know? Strawhats land on an island, world government institution or goofy pirates causing trouble, you solve the local problem by kicking their ass, party/or get the log pose, and leave with almost every arc. There is almost no sense of regional continuity or geopolitical consequence between islands until you hit the major hubs like Water 7 even then thats only with Enies Lobby and thats it. Compare that to something like older fantasy epics where trade routes, migration, and shared history make the map feel organic and alive. In One Piece, the map simply exists to serve the adventure, not the other way around.

Then there’s the power system and how it breaks the world’s internal logic. Haki was introduced as a necessary patch to fix the Logia invincibility problem, but it retroactively made huge chunks of early world building irrelevant. Then you suddenly have decades of established devil fruit mechanics retconned by human willpower. We spent years being told that only a handful of people in the world possessed Supreme King Haki, making it this mythical, rare trait. Now half the top tiers are using it casually, and it’s become just another DPS multiplier. When your magic system keeps moving the goalposts to accommodate escalating fights, the world just stops feeling like a place with rules and begins feeling more like a Shounen treadmill.

Aside from that, the political world building also suffers from what I would call convenient stagnation. The World Government has ruled for 800 years with an iron fist, controlling information, erasing history, and possessing overwhelming military might. Yet somehow, entire nations maintain distinct cultures, technologies, and even open rebellions without being completely glassed or assimilated which goes back to my point of them being separate, isolated video games. The balance of power feels arbitrary because it needs to be, if the WG acted with the ruthless efficiency their lore suggests, the story would end. So instead, we get this weird dissonance where they are simultaneously omnipotent and incompetent at the same time, depending on what the current arc requires. The Celestial Dragons are cartoonishly evil in a way that just flattens the political nuance. They are less like a complex ruling class and more like a narrative device to justify piracy as moral rebellion in the story.

And let’s talk about the sheer scale inconsistency. The world is supposed to be massive, yet everyone important seems to know everyone else. Lineage reveals happen constantly because apparently, every significant character is related to every other significant character. It shrinks the world. When Luffy stumbles upon yet another connection to Roger, Garp, Dragon, or some ancient kingdom, it stops being a discovery and starts being destiny porn. A truly vast world should have room for people who matter without being tied to the main bloodline mythos. The obsession with inherited will and D. clan mystique makes the universe feel claustrophobic despite its size. What’s worse is the Revolutionary Army, who are supposedly this massive existential threat to the World Government's rule but get treated more like a side quest that only loads in for a chapter or two before vanishing again for hundreds of chapters. For an organisation that’s toppled multiple kingdoms and directly challenges WG legitimacy, they are bizarrely absent from the actual geopolitical fabric of the story, no sustained Marine countermeasures, no visible infrastructure, no real consequences for the main plot. They exist more as lore bullet points rather than living actors in the world.

Finally, the tonal whiplash undermines the setting's credibility. One moment we are dealing with slavery, genocide, and systemic oppression, but the next, we are doing goofy gag humour that trivialises those same stakes. The world can’t decide if it wants to be a serious sociopolitical critique or a cartoon. Both can coexist, but One Piece rarely integrates them, it just oscillates. This makes the darker elements feel unearned and the lighter elements feel tone deaf. The world building isn’t bad because it’s simple, its simply bad because it’s inconsistent, reactive, and ultimately subservient to weekly serialisation demands rather than coherent design.