Lina's Blog

 A lot of things has happened the last 2 months, but I think one of the notable events are the ceasefire deal that happened in Gaza. For now, the situation is still on edge, but the bombing has finally stopped, and the Palestinians were finalle able to breath for the first time in 2 years. Of course, the humanitarian crisis continues and the situation is still very tragic, but I'm at least glad that the conflict has calmed down, and I hope that it continues to get better and not worse. Palestinians celebrating ceasefire news I think part of this should be given credit to the many people worldwide who stood for the Palestinians the last 2 years, with protests, strikes, boycotts, etc. For example, around 2 million Italians went on a one day general strike in over 100 cities, after Israel illegally detained and tortured activists from all over the world who carried aid in Global Sumud Flotilla. I think we're really witnessing the world changing. Now that innternet and social media...

When I was a kid, my dad would be away from home a lot. Sometimes for work, sometimes to visit his family back in Syria. So that meant we used a lot of online communication apps so we could stay in touch. Before we had Skype, we used an app called MSN Messenger. Because I was very young, I don't remember how it used to function, but I remember getting excited every time we turned the computer on to talk with my dad. I also faintly remember that my dad had a rubber duck for his profile image, but I don't remember what our profile image was since me and my sister would play around and change it a lot, haha. This picture will forever be iconic for me What's funny is that because internet connections back then was very weak, the best we could get a very pixelated video where we could barely make out the eyes and ears. I think for a lot of times video calls kept freezing so we had to only do voice calls instead. Me and my sister also used to play around with emoticons and animat...

 So Japan has a female pm now for the first time in history. Oh, finally people are going to stop complaining that Japan is run by old men! Look, a woman is a prime minister now, sexism is no more! I personally have a lot of problems with it, and as someone who happens to be very left-leaning, I'm not happy about it at all. One of the most common comments I hear is "oh, so a woman became a prime minister, but you feminists are still complaining". Yes. We are. So let's talk about LDP and their... er... fair treatment of women. This article , written only 4 years ago, talks about LDP finally allowing more women to attend meetings as long as they're silent, because according to Yoshi Mori, meetings attended by "talkative" women tend to "drag on". In 2023, approximately 20% of their members opposed a female PM (if you think that's little, it's 2 for every 10 people). And a survey in 2023 showed that LDP was the only party that the amount ...

 I wouldn't say I'm someone who reads comics a lot, since I didn't really grow up with them personally. Sure, my dad would enthusiastically show me Arabic copies of Tintin or Asterix comics stolen from the internet which were usually missing a few pages and scanned in a weird angle, but other than that I never really followed any specific comic or manga.  However, there's this one comic that I used to read a lot when I was a teen, based on an animated TV show called Avatar The Last Airbender. It used to be one of my favourite shows back then, and it's still one of the best shows I ever watched in my opinion. After I finished watching the show (for possibly the third time), I spent a lot of time consuming fan content or looking up for more content on the internet, and that's when I found out that the series had a comic. And even a continuation comic that continued from where the animated series left off. The one I'm about to show is a collection of short stor...

There was this video that I watched about English names for apartments in Japan, so I decided to share my thoughts about it. I did ramble a lot in the video so sorry about that haha. P.S. today is my birthday!

Playing games has always been one of my favorite ways to pass time, and it's something that carried me through both my best and worst moments in my life. At some point video games became more of an obsession than a way to pass time, so I've been recently trying to monitor my impulsive tendencies like getting too immersed or spending money. I think nowadays I have a much better appraoch than before and am able to manage the time I spend playing them, and not let myself become dependent on them for too long. As for my favorite games, there's one game I always talk about when people ask me that question, which is Reverse: 1999. A game with gorgeous graphics, amazing story, and, while for me personally it's the game's weakest point, a really interesting gameplay. The game is turned based tactical rpg, which means it doesn't have the stress of real-time games and rather, it focuses more on strategy and planning. The story itself is historical fiction, following the s...

As someone who enjoys cooking (and eating!), I always shy away from middle eastern food, because it takes so much time and effort to make. However, I think some of their dishes are really worth the trouble of spending hours for them, with one of them being Dolma. So many versions of Dolmas! I suggest you try them all if you ever get the chance. Personally not fan of the cabbage and eggplant ones though. Dolma means "stuffed" in Turkish, in Arabic we call it "mahashi", which essentially means the same thing. It's a dish that's very common across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Dolma is a dish made with cooked vegetables stuffed with rice, herbs and sometimes meat. The most common vegetables used are grape leaves, bell peppers, squash/zucchini, eggplants, tomato and cabbage.  My favourite one is stuffed zucchini made with the Syrian version, but because I don't have the proper tools to make them in Japan, nowadays I only make bell pepper Dolmas,...

 People keep asking me what kind of music I usually listen to, and I find that question one of the hardest ones to answer. I had strict parents, so I wasn't allowed to listen to music that my parent's didn't provide. So for pretty much 18 years, I didn't listen to songs much outside of what my family, and sometimes my friends, let me.  My childhood songs mostly consist of Fairuz and Arabic songs from a popular song channel for children called Toyor Al-Janah (old cast was better, nowadays their songs are a flop).  Toyor Al Jannah Logo. They now have so many variations of this for their different channels And even after I became an adult, listening to music hasn't become much of a habit, until I came to Japan and started listening to songs from Japanese music projects or anime. For English, most of the songs I know come from animated shows that I like, or from animatics (basically a storyboard with a soundtrack) made by creators on YouTube. One of the songs that I got...