Image is a snapshot taken from the recent Hezbollah video "Our Mountains, Our Treasures", showcasing their extensive underground fortifications, supply lines, and weaponry.
iran can't keep doing this to me, they've gotta respond soon, right? I'm gonna run out of analysis about countries soon, oh god
The COTW (Child of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific child every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied children. If you've wanted to talk about the child or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any child.
The Child of the Week is Hassan LargePenis! He is chad-and-cuck rater and general commenter @LargePenis@hexbear.net's son, born over a month ago. @Greenleaf@hexbear.net recommended I have him as the COTW for a week and I finally got around to it.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
This is actually something I'm currently trying to work out. For now my pricing is like 2/3 what most devs charge for static sites, but I'm doing that just to get going. It's sort of a intro price for the first clients. Then I want to charge closer to what others charge but take into account that my area is a bit lower income than, say, California. But I'm also wanting to avoid the trap of staying low. I know of a guy here that charges $600 for a WordPress theme flip and his sites look like dogshit.
See for yourself: https://hbbx2.com/
Meanwhile, not to really self promote but this is a hand-written custom template I'm gonna be using for my sites: https://ycwd-rocinante.netlify.app/
There is another guy that advertises locally on fucking craigslist but he's on the other side of the country so he's basically squatting as a "local dev". He states he starts at about $600 but I have a feeling at the end of the day it's closer to $3000 or so. His sites are also WP but they do look good.
So looking at competition prices, average prices for real freelancers, and the area I am at, I'm hoping between $2000 and $3500 for a site. I can make 2 a month no sweat but 4 per would be dope. Right now my price for eCommerce is parked at $5000 but ironically that was meant to scare away people until I figured out what I was gonna use for it. A guy I have been following charged $7000 for fully custom hand-coded eCommerce sites using headless Spotify, but if I can get away with using pure Spotify, and go with a lower entry point and commission, I think that might be alright.
The place I work at charges around USD 150 by the hour for custom software development which seems to be the going rate around here. We mostly do B2B stuff but the project I'll be working on for the foreseeable future is modernizing and expanding a very customised hand-coded e-commerce site where most of the code dates back to the mid noughties.
That sounds both very interesting and terrifying lol. The 90s was a totally different place for websites. I've seen freelancers charge $50-60/hour but I'm gonna go with a lump sum price for now. I am toying around with a SaaS model where clients pay me like $150 a month for a website, hosting and free updates/maintenance. A guy I've been following/stalking does this and has 85 websites on that model and he brings in over $120k passive income a year for the most part because of it. But that's a long way down the road. I do plan on charging $25-30 a month for hosting and that will pay for itself for the forseeable future on the first client since the paid tier for who I host with is $20/month. Get 20 clients over the next 2 years and that's $600 a month for free lol.