The footage circulating on social media shows three officers intervening against a young Romani man who keeps trying to get out from under them. One officer holds the man's feet, another then kneels on his neck for several minutes.
A third officer helps handcuff the man, who is shouting. Several Romani people who are bystanders can be heard in the footage commenting on the intervention.
"They're smothering him," a woman's voice can be heard to say. "That's their job," a man's voice says, defending the police intervention.
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Michal Mižigár, a Romani student of history and Romani Studies who won the Aspen Central Europe Leadership Award in 2019 from the Aspen Institute Central Europe, commented that the footage shows "The Romani Floyd today in Teplice!" Recalling the attack on Romani children at a summer camp run by the Romani musician Ida Kelarová and the death of a Romani man in police custody inside a pizzeria in Žatec, he added: "I feel genuinely powerless and sad. This is not the first case."
i've gotten a few messages asking if there are any donations set up for his family, or for the local Romani community there. AFAIK, there isn't, though i will make a separate post/update this one if i come across one. THAT SAID, the European Roma Rights Center is currently demanding a new investigation into the case, and you can help by donating to their organization! There will also be a demonstration in Teplice this coming Saturday, if you are in the area and wish to participate!
I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
i learned that in the 1936 Olympics two Japanese pole vaulters (Shuhei Nashida & Sueo Oe) tied for second. Declined to compete against each other, Nashida was awarded silver and Oe bronze. On return to Japan they had the medals cut in two & joined together to make two ‘friendship medals’ out of silver & bronze (x)
Being a mainly traditional artist myself it always irks me a little when I see sketches or even full illustrations being posted without any proper editing, making for a terrible presentation of an otherwise great piece.
So here are my tips for making your art not look shit in just a few easy steps.
You don´t need a fancy scanner for this, but if you have a digital camera at home I´d recommed you to use that instead of your smartphone. (However smartphone photos are also okay! Use whatever you have on hand)
Take a photo of your piece during the day in ambient lighting and try to make the paper lie as flat as possible. Avoid direct sunlight and artificial light as both will lower the quality of the picture. The inital photo will look something like this:
Not exactly breath-taking, huh? but don´t worry, we´ll get this prettied up.
Open the photo on your computer and turn + crop it
For the following editing I use Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is legally available as a free download, so there really is no reason not to get it. It comes with everything you´ll need for the edit.
(Unfortunately I have it set to German but I did my best to make my steps understandable)
Now, let´s get on with the edit! Select “Image” (Bild) in the top bar, go to “Adjustments” and first of all set the “Saturation” to zero (if you have a black and white drawing)
After that, pick “Brightness and Contrast” (also found in “Image” –> “Adjustments”) to brighten up your piece some more
Aleardy much better, hm? But as you can see, the bottom-left corner of the image is quite a lot brighter than the upper-right one, which prevents you from getting an even result.
Thankfully, this problem is easy to fix.
This way you can even out the brightness of the overall piece and finally use the “Brightness” and “Contrast” sliders one last time to get a clean result
This is already pretty good, but if you want to go the extra mile, you can use the eraser tool as well as filters (such as the liquify tool and sharpness) to remove little sketchy lines or fix small mistakes (classic example: adjust the position of the eyes to make them look more symmetrical)
And that´s it! With just about 5 - 10 minutes of editing you can get your drawing to look clean and presentable! (Coloured illustrations are usually easier to edit, just play around with “Brightness”, “Contrast”, “Color Balance” and “Saturation” until you manage to emulate the original look of the piece.)
I hope that this tutorial will help you level up your own editing from now on. Play around with new settings and see what works; you might discover even more useful options in the future!
