just here to vibe

yesterday's halloween piece

I know I've said this a hundred times but if you're worried about palestinian fundraisers being scams at least consider donating to MSF. It's a highly reputable organization which has broken its long-standing neutrality to denounce Israel in front of the UN. Here's all the aid MSF is providing to Gazans (documentation available in multiple languages).

Since I know no one's gonna click on that link, here's a quick overview of some of the various ways in which Medicins Sans-Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) is aiding Palestinians

- Since Oct 7 2023, MSF provided for 14000 hospital admissions and 7500 surgeries, on top of treating 27500 people for physical violence causes, treating 34000 people for diarrhoea (very common condition in Gaza currently due to the sanitary crisis) and holding 18000 mental health sessions.

-MSF is currently operating in two hospitals, eight healthcare facilities and fifteen mobile clinics, providing surgical support, wound care, physiotherapy, maternity and paediatric care, basic healthcare, vaccinations, and mental health services among other things (more info on the treatments provided by each facility on the link above). Additionally, they provide training for psychological, medical and paramedical volunteers, and donate first aid kits to various camps (info on the specific locations on the link above).

- Via their partnership with the Palestinian Agriculture and Development Association, they're building latrines for over 30000 people in six camps, distributing hygiene kits to 2400 families, and ensuring clean drinking water for 25000 people, on top of equipping a camp for 70 families with accessible sanitary facilities for disabled people.

- Since October 7, 2023, eight of their medics have died. Seven of them are remembered here, and their latest, Hasan Suboh, in this statement that denounces Israel's allies for disregarding the fact that the protection of humanitarian workers is not being guaranteed as they claim.

MSF does not only stand for Palestine in humanitarian terms, it also does so politically to an extent, holding Israel and its allies accountable for sabotaging ceasefire negotiation attempts.

MSF also provides aid to Sudan, the Democratic Republic Of Congo, Haiti, Ethiopia and 76 other countries.

To better maximize your donation to MSF, I advise keeping an eye out for donation doubling and tripling periods, which occur fairly often and can be checked on their website.

i'm the guy who writes the books that the protagonist in supernatural horror movies frantically reads somewhere in act ii. job's pretty easy. lot of "legends of vampires have recurred all throughout human history" and "demonologists agree that the quickest way to un-summon a demon is to trap it in a cursed object". no citations of course; they don't pay me citation money. i had to learn html back in the early aughts when everyone started seeking their supernatural info on websites they found via top search engines like FINDLER and WEBSIGHT but that's died down now which is great because i didn't have it in me to pick up css. currently working on a new book about horses that are evil. it's called HORSES THAT ARE EVIL in all caps so the protagonist can find it quickly to yank off the library shelf. it will be published 35 years ago.

detective comics 1090 cover by ashley wood

a pleasant evening to all girls getting a little sloppy on a monday night

Francheska Yarbusova. Illustration for Yuri Norstein's "The Tale of Tales" (1979).

Black Christmas —1974, dir. Bob Clark

I like when the bus stops directly in front of you out of the line of waiting people and opens its doors. Chosen by the dragon

where is your boy tonight i hope he is the skeleton

hi here’s a cool bird I betcha didn’t know existed, ✨the wallcreeper✨

it literally looks like a monarch butterfly it’s so cute

the creeperrrrrrrrr

just some lads, being fellows

this is your periodic reminder that for all the artifacts and errors and "tells" one could possibly list, the only reliable way to actually determine if an image is ai generated is to investigate the source. it is becoming increasingly common for "fake classical paintings" to circulate around curative aesthetic blogs, and everyone should be using this as an opportunity to not only exercise their investigative skills but also appreciate art more in general. you're all checking out the artists you reblog, right? 🫣

so what are some signs to look for? let's use this very good example.

right before rain

16 frame shooting star animation. January 2022-September 2024 Needlepoint

Frames from my shooting star gif. 16 frames total. Each frame is 8x6.5 inches on a 10” mesh. Designed and animated in photoshop and needlepointed by me. I started drafting this 1/14/22 and finished animating it 9/25/24. It took approximately two years and eight months to finish. This is one of the largest projects I’ve ever worked on and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

“Gfm doesn’t operate in Palestine therefore….”

It doesn’t operate in other places too if people would take time to read it instead of constantly citing this when seeing an ask from a gfm account. People will ignore the other countries to point to one of them and call it a day.

Don’t listen to people/anons who comment like this on your posts. They’re being ignorant on purpose.

Family/friends can do what they need to. That’s a fact that gets waved away and dismissed in order to continuously spread the false information that every gfm ask you get is a bot.

Gfm doesn’t operate in multiple places so consistently stating just one is ignoring what else is there.

“But how can you trust friends/family making it because…”

It’s called researching and checking the details out yourself.

There's this really cool thing that a handful of diaspora Palestinians have committed a lot of time and effort to called vetting (maybe you've heard of it?) in which they speak directly with a fundraiser holder face-to-face or over phone/video call to verify all portions of a fundraiser. There are so many posts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that talk about the details of this process to verify that a fundraiser organizer, recipient, and the details are correct by verifying legal documents like proof of residence, photo ID, fluency in Palestinian-Dialect Arabic, family tree constructions, etc.

These vetters have been posting about Palestinian/Gaza/Arab culture/Islam/etc. for a really long time, [1] [2] [3] (these are Wayback machine links to the tumblr accounts of 90-ghost, el-shab-hussein, & nabulsi before you start crying "but, you can post backdate on tumblr!") [4] (moayesh's Instagram because his tumblr is fairly new) meaning that they didn't just pop up after Oct 2023 to start posing as a qualified individual. They are real diaspora Palestinians with stories to tell and culture to share.

GFM also has strict requirements for withdrawing money, needing evidence of a bank account from a country they service and a solid way to transfer funds from that bank account to the recipient's bank account. If the funds are withheld from the intended recipient, that can be reported to and resolved by GFM.

If you're too overwhelmed by trying to distinguish between scams and real fundraisers, then whatever. That's your problem, not everyone else's. You don't need to publicly announce to everyone that you're too busy/tired/incompetent/ignorant to properly investigate fundraisers, so everyone else should stop supporting them as well. There are plenty of vetters and scam-busting blogs dedicated to helping people distinguish between real and fake; you can read my pinned post for the full list. No more defeatist rhetoric about how it's impossible to tell. We owe Ghazans better.

"I've not got time..." so I should encourage "...people to donate..." to charities and delete fundraising asks because I'm incapable of telling the difference. As if you're the be-all and end-all of fundraiser verification.

Donating to established nonprofit aid organizations is absolutely a good deed and is much more straightforward, but it's not the only way to help. Especially with the repeated aid blockages, sometimes Ghazan families need a more direct flow of money to pay for the ridiculously inflated cost necessities (I recently received a video from Farah wherein she states that a bottle of dish soap cost $50. $50!!!!) as well as save up for evacuation costs once the Egyptian border crossing opens. (Thousands of dollars!) Many of these people have lost jobs and/or the family breadwinners are dead. They can't survive off your "#free palestine" aesthetic posts.