an option the stars don't have

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.

All soups are good soups! And I only have 11 slots so I apologise in advance if your favourite isn’t here.

DOCTOR WHO (2005–) The End of Time – Part 1

So, I responded to a post over on my personal blog about people behaving "weird" in public and mentioned that being a bit smelly is not, in fact, a moral failure. And I just looked at the comments and feel deeply moved to reiterate:

Smelling bad in public is not a moral failure.

In fact, I'll go one step further:

There is no moral dimension to cleanliness.

There are all sorts of reasons a person might be dirty in public. They might not have access to the facilities or products they need to stay clean, they might be coming home from a dirty activity, they might have mental or physical conditions that make it hard for them to maintain their personal hygiene, they might be dependent on other people for their hygiene needs and those needs aren't being met.

Also, with smells in particular, "bad" is subjective. I'm personally extremely sensitive to perfumes and aftershaves, and while I can sit quite peacefully in a crowded bus that smells of BO, I often have to leave shops or get off buses because someone's perfume, which they no doubt think makes them smell lovely, is actually making me gag.

You don't have to go and huff great, gusting lungfuls of air around the next smelly person you bump into in the corner shop. By all means, breathe through your mouth, change your seat, open the window, wish the situation were different.

But you do need to let go of this idea that a smelly or dirty person is also a bad person. They're literally just a person - just another human animal living in their animal body, trying to get from one day to the next. Sometimes, people are dirty. Sometimes, they smell bad. If that's not something you can encounter without taking personal offence, you need to seriously reassess your own expectations of being in public.

starting a collection. please add on

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

probably just a coincidence and not at all a linguistic marker or anything...

[talking about my favorite characters] okay so THESE two come in a bonded pair and if i think about them too hard i start taking poison damage

neurodivergent and queer people how are we feeling?

outfit swap

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

reading this post be like

#Elmo's so real

i imagine this has been done before, but not in a way that includes ME (the most important person)

for the record, i think it tastes a bit like soap and i love it

it's like if soap tasted good.

yes exactly!

What kind of soap are y'all eating?

cilantro is a 'sharp'/astringent flavor like alcohol. without embedded sociocultural exposure, some people associate that sharpness with the astringency of soap. with sociocultural exposure, there isn't an association with soap until/unless suggested. so. culture.

honestly the cilantro tastes like soap thing is a combination of regular cultural racism (why are we not comparing cilantro to actual human food or gin or vodka?) and weird genetic racism (why don't white people like cilantro? do we have different genes? (no. the "cilantro soap gene" is actually just a region of DNA makes some tastes sharper. our culture is what associated that sharpness with soap.))

So its an aldehyde thing! Cilantro leaves contain aldehydes, and cyclamen aldehyde is fragrance molecule that has been commonly used in soaps since ~1920.

I guess that technically means that cilantro doesn’t taste like soap. Modern soap just smells like cilantro. Which is Wild.

that is really interesting, actually!

i’m still trying to get my head around “not having better words to explain why a genetic quirk makes an herb taste inedible to me through no fault of my own (and despite a genuine desire for it to taste edible as so many cuisines i love use it frequently) is racism.”

the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world