maybe if i bang on the walls estrogen will seep out

Renaissance(distinct lines, stability and the individual man):

Baroque (bold, chaotic, dramatic):

Romantic(romanticize the simple hard working life):

EVERYBODY knows (or should) that you DO. NOT. STOP. in Vidor, Texas. 

It’s best to just run out of gas elsewhere. Whatever you do, black folks, DO NOT STOP IN VIDOR, TEXAS. 

There’s a good chance you’ll get lynched or just come up missing - and I’m not joking.

also do NOT stop in Harrison, Arkansas!!!! (relatively close to OK and MI) a nazi town with a BIG KKK organization.

https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php

This website has a clickable map where you can see suspected and confirmed sundown towns by state, as well as information about whether these attitudes are historical or current.

reblog for the link

here’s the official fbi memo about it! you can view the whole document here

Here's why:

I have NO money to give you

I'm not a popular enough blog that I will give you any reach

I am a minor, and most of my followers are too

It makes me feel extremely guilty

Seeing pictures of injuries or hospitals etc are triggering for me (which are in most intro posts for this sort of thing)

They are always worded in a way that makes me feel like I am a murderer if I don't donate

It makes me feel uncomfortable

I said I don't want them, and my boundaries should be respected

I can't tell what is a bot and what isn't

I get a lot of spam from this. It is disappointing to see 10 new asks in my inbox just to be the same ask for donations over and over

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

"This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."

Sure, "High Tower is a powerful language, but it's such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it's simple to write and can do nearly everything I need" "cranky because you can't memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren't you?" "LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!" *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the "camera".

"you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It's like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you've got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language"

"the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in." "how can you be sure?" "you see that teleport?" "no" "well, if you COULD see it, you'd see it's written in Adevic Yevi. That's the Kalic magic language." "couldn't it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them..." "no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they're being paid to. It's a language written by committee."

Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird "functional wizards". (They're obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)

There's a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of "fireball" takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically "AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!"

There's a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old "Summon Bread and Fishes" spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it's in Unity, it'll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which'll obviously be good for disaster areas. It's just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.

Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they're neat, but it'll never catch on. And either you're right, or the next time you're applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you're like "it only came out 2 years ago!" "aren't you a chronomancer?" "oh good point. Yeah I've been using it for 20-30 years."

There's wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There's this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there's only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he's got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you'll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated... It's tricky but it seems to work. He's working on a teleport spell, but so far it's mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).

It's wands vs staves vs bare hands.

Wanders are like "they're available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it's so powerful!"

Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it's a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.

Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don't need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.

If you get a message from an account claiming to be a Palestinian fundraiser, it is a bot. It is a scam. You need to report & delete the message and encourage others to do the same.

I know because I get messages on this account DAILY. I have a very high follower count and I'm pretty active and I interact with my followers a lot, and apparently that all adds up to one big bot magnet.

Bots following and messaging this account was a MASSIVE problem before Tumblr fixed its new account policies. I used to spend literally hours blocking and reporting the hundreds of bots that I would get following me each day.

I learned a lot about bots and how to identify them. The easiest way is with no avatar, "untitled" in the blog description (BTW if your avatar is still set to default PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD change it because you run a substantial risk of being accidentally blocked & reported as a bot).

One of the dead give aways of a bot was what I call "word salad" names. Three seemingly random words strung together making no sense, always adjective, adjective or noun, noun. If you reported a lot of these bots, you'd notice the same words kept showing up.

Nowadays, I am bombarded with fundraiser requests and sometimes, they don't even bother to hide the fact that they're a bot. The avatar is default, the blog title is "untitled," and the blog name is a classic randomly-generated word salad.

However MOST of the requests I get come from at least semi-legit looking accounts. There are pictures, a name, a story. Never mind that I've gotten that message three times from different accounts.

Sometimes, they claim to be vetted, but the whole vetting system essentially adds up to "trust me bro." There is no way of guaranteeing that this account isn't just lying about being vetted, claiming to be vetted by a false person, or are using the identity of a real Palestinian to scam people.

Previously, I've seen a lot of people getting attacked for raising questions about these fundraisers and getting attacked for being racist or for harming Palestinian families in danger, like Tumblr isn't a website famous for its scams and the words "The Arkh Project" "All or Nothing" or "Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles" mean nothing to you.

I personally have been scammed by people claiming to be charities on Tumblr before, specifically, The Leelah Project which used the name of a trans teenager who died by suicide to swindle people out of their money.

Luckily, there are actual, respected charities out there you can give money to if you want to help the cause:

Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

Palestine Red Crescent Society

United Nations Relief Works Agency

Islamic Relief

World Central Kitchen

Médecins Sans Frontièrs

One of the hardest things to accept about the situation in Palestine is that realistically, there is very little that your average outsider can do to change it. However, these large, well-respected and trustworthy charities are out there doing the hard work to keep people alive, and should be where the donation money is going

These scam bots feed on people's naïvety and need to believe that they are making a difference, and even worse, feed on the fear that by ignoring them, it somehow makes you a racist doing direct harm to a refugee family, when in fact they are using the suffering of Palestinians to take away money from those in need.

As far as fundraisers that don't send out random asks for donations, I honestly don't know. You'll have to do the work yourself and approach with much caution.

I honestly don’t know what to think in terms of if there are actual real people anywhere at all buried in my inbox, but considering the plethora of supposedly vetted people asking for money in my inbox in exactly the same way there were a plethora of “people” in my inbox with completely bare accounts and “dying pets” asking for money with the same verbiage as each other…

Tumblr has always been a place where scams are pretty rampant. Yes, Tumblr is also a social media website where people are posting their legitimate fundraisers, but that’s exactly why scams can run as rampant as they do here.

Because it’s easy to prey on people who are already tuned into an issue. And with this one in particular, when even this post has people screaming at OP about how supposedly racist they are for this post, people are taking their own feelings of helplessness and reckoning with the fact that they are privileged and feel like they’ve finally been presented with a low-effort way to help and are lashing out at the people who are claiming this low-effort “help” they’ve glommed onto is rife with scams with that guilt they were feeling from reckoning with privilege—“I’m doing a thing which helps me feel less racist in a world where I’m privileged, and so you making a post like this one and telling me I’m not being less racist is a threat to me not being racist; you must be the racist!”

Anyway. The takeaway from this post shouldn’t really be, “do or do not donate to tumblr fundraisers for anything,” and certainly shouldn’t be, “and so you’re saying we shouldn’t donate our money at all?” like so many people are jumping to.

I'm now getting an amount of fundraiser asks in my inbox that I can't keep up with, and a lot of them are very obvious scams, and some of them are likely legitimate, but there are so many that I can't keep up.

I think a lot of the logic of "give recklessly!" comes from there being pretty hard limits on what an irl scam can consist of. Let's say I'm at the grocery store, and the woman in front of me can't pay for her groceries, oh no, and she's got her arm in a sling, and it's her five year old daughter's birthday too, and she starts crying as she's putting the items back one-handed... I think most people wouldn't give a shit if maybe that woman was scamming us. I think most of us, assuming we could, would pull out our wallet and tell her not to worry, it's really no problem, and buy the boxed cake mix and the toilet paper and the whatever else for her.

But... what's the worst thing that can happen in that situation, really? The worst possible outcome is "I bought <$100 worth of ordinary groceries for a woman who was actually a scam artist". That's a risk worth taking for the people who are really in need, right? That's a totally reasonable trade off.

I'm at no risk of getting my personal information via a gofundme lookalike password harvester. I'm not even really at much risk of getting my credit card number stolen, unless the checkout clerk is in on the scam, which is pretty unlikely.

More than that, you know what there is absolutely zero risk of at all? There is no risk that if I pay for this woman's groceries, those groceries will be used to directly fund and maintain a massive human trafficking operation in Myanmar. There is no risk that, by paying for her groceries, my name will be placed on a list of marks, and I will then be accosted by dozens upon dozens of human trafficking victims who are all being forced to enact "sad mother tearfully putting back groceries" scams, as well as vehicular scams, romance scams, extortion scams, and more, literally at gunpoint. I'm not going to "do good recklessly" at the supermarket, and then as a direct result of that, have my next six coffee dates all turn out to be people who were lured to a foreign country with the promise of a good job, had their passport stolen, and are being kept in a warehouse with limited access to food, water, and basic hygiene – who have been threatened that unless they can go on hundreds of coffee dates a day and convince at least a dozen of those people to pour money into a crypto scam, their captors will make the hell that they are living even worse.

If any of that was a realistic possibility in the case of an irl grocery store sob story, don't you think we'd all be a little less likely to reach for our wallets?

"Do good recklessly" does not mean "it's fine to recklessly give money to anyone who says they need it, even if there are very good reasons to suspect that a huge amount of that money is going directly to a literal human trafficking ring".

Please please please give to real charities instead of random fundraising asks you receive online. If you can't be convinced to do it for the sake of not getting scammed, then do it for the sake of not wanting to participate in genuinely horrific abuse. Every dollar you send to a scammer who is using the stolen identity of a vetted Palestinian in need? It doesn't just get pocketed; it also very likely goes to support this:

honestly, i love you all, but i don't donate to tumblr links; i find charities with reputable histories.

I REPEAT, THE CHILD IS BORN!!