italian academia. it’s like dark academia, except the the walls of your school building have long cracks running all the way down to the floor because they haven’t been fixed since the irregular construction boom of the 80s, one of the ceiling lamps creaks and flickers ominously, you drink espressos from the machine, and the most common crime is not murder but driving down the corridors in a scooter
there are no words to describe how much I adore the concept/trope of physical contact to warm someone up/keep someone warm:
Holding someone who’s shivering a bit tighter (they can’t stop the shakes, but they can give the comfort that someone else is there and trying their hardest to share their body heat)
That thing where someone drapes a blanket around someone’s shoulders and gives their arms a quick lil rub
when one person has chills and is just cold and miserable, and the other person finally can’t stand seeing them shake anymore and lets them huddle up next to them
when someone is soaked to the bone, and the other person rubs them dry with a towel and lets them curl into their side until they warm up
When someone hugs someone else and and vigorously rubs their back to generate some extra heat
That kind of hug where someone is clearly giving the warmth and the other person is curled up in their arms and stealing as much as they can
Imagine, you’re Belarusian. You’ve been getting fucked over by your government since you were a teenager, being forced to attend some kind of pro-government mass gatherings, being shoved propaganda down your throat in school. In 2020, you take the streets under the white-red-white flag, you are beaten by the cops, maybe tortured at the police. However, the regime doesn’t change, and you just try to carry on with your life.
In 2022, your mad dictator allows the neighboring dictatorship to launch rockets from your country’s territory to kill Ukrainian people and bring devastation to Ukraine. To the country where so many of your friends who fled the political repressions live, where your Ukrainian friends live, where hundreds of innocent people die every day. You are broken. You risk being punished, but you try to help the attacked country with money anyway.
Imagine, you are Russian. Since the 24th of February, you lead a righteous, but unhappy life. Are you given a huge fine for actually protesting the war or for passing by? Or maybe for the Ukrainian flag on your bag? Do they catch you in the subway after the protest? Do they write down your passport address and come to your parents, scare them, telling stories about how protesters like their child get expelled from their universities or even “get caught with drugs”? Do they just bring you to the police bus or do they pin you to the ground and beat you up with their sticks? All that when people around you, including those close to you, call the war a “special operation of denazifying Ukraine”, painting Z the new swastika on their cars, calling you out for being anti war. Or maybe they just don’t care about anything at all. To sum up, you pay a high price for speaking up in a fascist country.
Whether you are Belarusian or Russian, at some point, you decide it’s suffocating to live here, and you decide to leave the country. As a Belarusian, maybe you leave for Lithuania to join the Belarusian anti war movement there, that provides real help to Ukraine. As a Russian, wherever you go, you’re glad to finally be able to donate to Ukrainian organizations and not be sentenced for 20 years in prison for that.
Maybe you’re already in IT, maybe you start to learn web programming to have a plan B - a demanded skill. You keep a lot of stuff on your PC as well. Documents. Photos. Lots of things that many people keep on their hard drives.
Obviously, you trust NPM modules. Why the hell wouldn’t you?? They’re just your good old familiar npm? Javascript and shit?
Well, turns out, some idiots take virtue signaling on another fucking level. Turns out, the idiots are in web development as well.
And they decide they have a right to punish you by wiping out a who knows how big of a part of your life span. Punish you terribly for your place of residence.
