#based on multiple different parts

[bookwyrminspiration]

Relating to your last ask on how Sophie handled your parents, I'm always interested as to what alternatives could have been. Could they have done a fake boarding school esque situation, possibly having to use Beguiling or the like to convince her parents to let her go? Could they have erased only Sophie but kept the rest of their memories intact (but they might still have to remove them from their location)? If that's beyond an average telepath's capabilities, is that something Sophie might be able to do (likely with the training she didn't have at the time)? Could she have brought them to the elven world with her and in doing so become the beginning of rebuilding the bridge between humans and elves? What do you think would be best for all parties, if the situation had been approached differently and with more care than the elves showed in canon? Would it inevitably be a tradeoff between keeping Sophie in her parents' lives and keeping her parents safe?

Oo okay alright alright! Very interesting. I'm going to go through these and assess them based on what problems may be encountered and whether they'd be a plausible alternative--but! this is just for fun and my opinion, please don't take it against you, I'm doing this enthusiastically not critically :)

Fake boarding school: I feel like this is close to an idea Sophie wondered about, and the main obstacle here would be getting them to agree--hence the beguiler thing. But then we also encounter the problem of how long would the beguiling last? Would they need to be continuously beguiled, and would the council approve using a beguiler for that when they could use an alternative? Probably not. This also requires Sophie to continue constantly lying to her parents--even more so than before--which was something she didn't think she could keep up much longer. It's not impossible, but the technicals of this seem difficult and strenuous

Erasing only Sophie: Possibly! But like you said, that level of skill is probably beyond the average telepath, making it significantly more difficult. And given what we learned from Damel, until he worked alongside Sophie, he'd never washed memories without risk of triggering them back. There would be so many things that could trigger those memories. Another question would be: how many memories are left after that? Sophie has been integral to their lives for over a decade, how are they going to fill that gap? What's Sophie-free? I think it's a plausible solution, but would be very very difficult and time consuming, and have a good risk of triggered memories (since Sophie wasn't able to help yet).

Bringing them to the elven world: At the time, the council was involved and overseeing things. I can't imagine any situation where they'd knowingly allow three humans to live in the elven world just because Sophie didn't want to leave them. There's also the fact that they are human. Sophie moves to the Lost Cities for many reason, but one of them being that she's an elf who doesn't belong in the Forbidden Cities. Her family would be just as out of place if not more so in the Lost Cities, and I don't think Sophie could do that to them. They don't speak the language (although it can be given, as we saw with Amy), they can't light leap without help, they're not going to be treated kindly by anyone else if anyone else even knows of their presence. Amy said in Nightfall that as amazing as the Lost Cities were, she could tell that she didn't belong and wanted to go back home.

I've said this before, but honestly? I don't think there is a better option than what we saw in canon, or at least I haven't encountered it yet. There's no good option, it's inherently an immoral and unethical situation, and I just can't envision one where everything works out best for everyone and could actually be implemented. Your second suggestion about erasing only Sophie could be an improvement, but I worry that retaining the rest of their memories would inevitably lead to triggered memories of Sophie, and that can only happen so many times before they'd just erase their memories fully because it wasn't working.

If everyone was super super agreeable and realism disregarded, the closest I get is if Sophie's human parents are made fully aware of the situation and then knowingly allow her to attend Foxfire and engage in the elven world while still living with her. But the elves won't let that happen and that puts a huge target on her family, who are human and can't defend themselves against the Neverseen once they enter the story more fully. It can't last

So for now (and my opinion may change) it does seem like an inevitable trade off. I don't think they're good, but the two options presented in canon (fake death or erased) are the best of a bunch of shitty options. I'm not sure what I would've picked between the two if I were in that situation, but I think Sophie picking what she did was in character, and therefore the better option for the story.

But again, these are all just my thoughts and opinions and how I've engaged with the story. There's no right answer here, and I say this all as part of an enthusiastic analytical conversation, not as critical judgement of anything :)

[astral-schools]

enjoy your stay!

[ghosttrolls]

I got this at a mall today, it was still shrink wrapped when I bought it so as far as I could tell it was mint. But I opened it and I think there's a disc missing, i think maybe it's Disc 2 of season 2, part 1 (that's a mouthful, but that is how they chose to label these...). I looked online and I'm supposed to have 10 DVDs in here but I've counted over and over and there's only nine. Here's pictures of the DVDs in the set:

I think the spread where Danny on a green background is opposite Vlad is supposed to have another dvd in between. Am I understanding this right? I can't play these to verify until later, I just wanted to see what the box art looked like on the inside...

[whatudottu]

You know, sitting here thinking about TFP humanformers I have rather found it difficult to come up with an idea for a human Predaking, seeing as how his entire schtick as a predacon lead him to being depersonified and marked as a beast before folks realised he could transform.

I mean, these are just humanformer ideas based on Predaking KEEPING his canonical treatment rather than making Predaking and changing the dynamics that way. It does involve some uh... dehumanisation under the cut to keep with the theme, so keep in mind if you DO read, but those parts are mainly in the 'struggling to come up with a concept that isn't racist' section.

The first ideas that I had for him would probably to make him into a super soldier, and sure it works but- if you attempt to 'discipline' a super soldier the way Starscream tried to do so with a predacon's beast mode, I think you'll be walking away with broken shins (aka not walking at all). Another idea was to bring a fucked up 'shockwave inspired' element that would lead to the amp 'beast' comparisons to be made, but the more 'beastman' version of this idea is VERY DELICATE to work with (read: comparing a human to an animal is VERY HISTORICALLY and still PRESENTLY a not great thing to do) but also doesn't quite FEEL that predacon to me; predacons are emphasised to be ANCIENT not that they are extant animals, so if Shockwave has done anything to beastify a human I think insecticons may be that unit of humans.

No, I think that for a human to be considered a beast without being racist about it would be to turn predacons from 'animals' to 'monsters', to Frankenstein's monsters. Though I thought of I think a vague Frankenstein comparison before, I will bring up that many others have also seen some modern Prometheus allegories between Shockwave and Predaking. I was mainly inspired by my [insert number here] rewatch of OSP's Frankenstein episode and especially the particular eye colour Adam was depicted with, but the basic idea of being a dead person brought back to life with the best pieces carefully selected by someone wholly dedicated to the craft of science (irrespective of Frankenstein's dropout status) plus how the monster is almost universally feared? Come on, this is the 'in' I needed if I wanted to keep the general fear of the unknown with Predaking and the Decepticon High Command.

And what better show to introduce a character that is this compilation of ancient human DNA and real corpse than a show that has previously introduced ZOMBIES and will later introduce VAMPIRES!?

If Shockwave shows up, after 3 seasons worth of knowing what a zombie is and that it's a real possible thing to happen - in addition to the fact your own fucking leader stuck a shard of 'zombie making' juice into his chest/bloodstream/whatever the humanformers version of Megan would do - with a creature visibly made up of the dead with eyes of something very non-human, would you welcome them with open arms? Adam Frankenstein certainly wasn't, not even from his own dad which Predaking can at least attest to actually having SOME sort of decent relationship with Shockwave.

In a way, it modifies the predacon fossil scavenger hunt to be 'global graverobbers' which in a humanformers setting might actually be 'go to this great battle and recover the bones of not only our but our enemies bones to provide a human base' which could EMPHASISE the monstrosity of Predaking's nature as a melting pot of old friends and foe mashed together into one fucked up super soldier. In a canon parallel this mixture of gene sequences and cadavers would still influence Knock Out and Starscream to think turning the corpse of C.Y.L.A.S. into their own super soldier would still be a good idea, having something else besides the dark 'energon' (if it is not still energon) fuck up the experiment and make a tech-modified human into some kinda fucked up vampire. Heck, with this old post of mine comparing the looks of the new predacons to the two big blue (dead) bots, this humanformers concept for Predaking can persist and continue to be used by Shockwave to create Skylynx and Darksteel, not made of battles long passed but of the freshest bodies the scientist would have access to.

But I guess canonically there has only ever been 2 zombie hordes throughout the entirety of TFP, if you consider the horde in Thirst to be very hungry vampire thralls instead (considering they were killed rather than revived, I'd place them under 'vampire'), so perhaps not a lot of bots can go 'this is terrifying' and not a lot of evidence that Shockwave can gather about why they are at this level of hesitancy; it's not a simple fear of the unknown, it's the type of fear from experience. But I have a trick up my sleeve!

BOOM, Altered Loyalties baby; human edition, of course.

This might deserve it's own post but essentially, a humanformers 'Shockwave's Monster' Predaking would have a lot more precedence for being a Unicron made monstrosity if the threat of Unicron damned creatures exist as a background constant. A threat to base verse to their position on Earth, a threat in humanformers because the dead outnumber them. All the while, Shockwave stands beside a being created from those very same dead that may or may not have risen from the corruption of WHATEVER it is within the Earth's core, only to announce this is a very new SUPER SOLDIER!? Zombies are one thing with their durability and their hordes, but this creature - this DEMON - stands there with advance agility, enhanced endurance, and superior strength!?

To later find that it - that HE - is not merely a walking corpse, but an intellectual, sends shivers even down Megatron's spine. Megatron, the head of one of the last remaining shreds of humanity, staring at the undead being not only made to be harder, better, faster, stronger than him, but capable of intelligence in much the same way as the poetic ex-gladiator.

He WILL NOT go extinct.

[sqlmn]

Seeing as the person who drew this for me and listens to me yell about these two and Rudyard is currently Illegal For Tumblr, I have been given permission to post this!

So a huge thank you I'm crying @ gunhorse ;0; my kids look great and I wuv them... I'm sobbing.

(And for those wondering, the agent named Bravo encounters Katale a fair amount though completely intentional from her. He thinks that she's just a very nice woman who got mixed up in the wrong crowd and she doesn't seem to wish him hard and he doesn't wish her harm so in the end when he sees her he's putting his gun away into a shoulder holster because he's a Good Boy.)

[boyruggeroii]

>something is wrong

>figures out what's wrong

>figures out how to fix it

>it's a multi step plan, requires patience but ok

>is the only plan possible. also, locked steps

>there is a fundamental fault that renders step one unfeasible

>can't repair fault because it's built in

>have fun

[fivepebblerhehe]

so I got a toa oc based off of a fanmade kanohi of mine: the kanohi ardukua: mask of animation. Basically what it does is it brings inanimate objects to life. So for the toa I was thinking he'd be a po toa, and the last of his team. So he uses his kanohi to make golems with the parts of his teammates he salvaged (the ardukua can't animate corpses, but if parts are incorporated into some other material it works) he probably did this as some twisted way of honoring their memory but eventually started genuinely believing they were his teammates (like their spirits were in them or something)

[strawberrydykke]

i hate writing emails ):

[fizzingwizard]

"My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly. The consequence of this, upon a mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced as Mrs. Brandon’s, was but too natural. She resigned herself at first to all the misery of her situation; and happy had it been if she had not lived to overcome those regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned. But can we wonder that, with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her[...] she should fall?" - Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

[rocaillefox]

can people please stop turning furry worlds into fantastical racism/making up furry stereotypes. i do not want to read 'all cats are troublemakers. all bears are police. all rabbits are caregivers.' like, peoples features and bodies do not signify anything about personality, morality, political stance, etc. and the bioessentialism inherent to that concept absolutely reeks. this is not a politically neutral thing jsjfbvj

[iraprince]

gonna show u guys a little opalescent highlight hack i threw together today

rainbow gradient above your main figure (i usually have all my main figure folders/layers in one big folder, so i can clip gradient maps + adjustments to it!). liquify tool to push the colors around a bit. STAY WITH ME I KNOW IT LOOKS STUPID RN I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS

THEN: set it to add/glow (or the equivalent in ur drawing program), lower the opacity a bit, and apply a layer mask. then u can edit the mask with whatever tools you like to create rainbow highlights!!

in this case i'm mostly using the lasso fill tool to chip out little facets, but i've also done some soft airbrushing to bring in larger rainbow swirls in some areas. it's pretty subtle here, but you can see it better when i remove the gradient map that's above everything, since below i'm working in greyscale:

more granular rambling beneath the cut!

u could also just do this with a brush that has color jitter, but what i like about using layer masks for highlight/shading layers is how simple and reversible it makes everything. i can use whatever brushes i want, and erasing/redoing things is super low stakes, which is great when i often approach this stuff with a super trial-and-error approach.

example: have u ever thrown a gradient w multiple colors over an entire piece, set it to multiply etc, and then tried to erase it away to carve out shadows/highlights? it's super frustrating, bc it looks really good, but if u erase something and then change ur mind later, u basically would have to like. recreate the gradient in the area u want to cover up again. that's how i used to do things before figuring out layer masks!! but masking basically creates a version of this with INFINITE undo bc u can erase/re-place the base layer whenever u want.

anyway, back to rambling about this specific method:

i actually have TWO of these layers on this piece (one with the liquified swirls shown above, and another that's just a normal concentric circle gradient with much broader stripes) so i can vary the highlights easily as needed.

since i've basically hidden the rainbow pattern from myself, the colors in each brushstroke i make will kind of be a surprise, which isn't always great -- but easily fixable! for example, if i carve out a highlight and it turns out the rainbow pattern in that area is way too stripey, i can just switch from editing the mask to editing the main layer and blur that spot a bit.

also, this isn't a full explanation of the overall transparency effect in these screencaps! there's other layer stuff happening below the rainbow highlights, but the short version is i have all this character's body parts in different folders, each with their own lineart and background fill, and then the fill opacity is lowered and there's multiply layers clipped to that -- blah blah it's a whole thing. maybe i'll have a whole rundown on this on patreon later. uhhh i think that's it tho! i hope u get something useful out of this extremely specific thing i did lmao

[thistlecrimes]

Things I've learned from getting covid for the first time in 2023

I wear an N95 in public spaces and I've managed to dodge it for a long time, but I finally got covid for the first time (to my knowledge) in mid-late November 2023. It was a weird experience especially because I feel like it used to be something everyone was talking about and sharing info on, so getting it for the first time now (when people generally seem averse to talking about covid) I found I needed to seek out a lot of info because I wasn't sure what to do. I put so much effort into prevention, I knew less about what to do when you have it. I'm experiencing a rebound right now so I'm currently isolating. So, I'm making a post in the hopes that if you get covid (it's pretty goddamn hard to avoid right now) this info will be helpful for you. It's a couple things I already knew and several things I learned. One part of it is based on my experience in Minnesota but some other states may have similar programs.

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The World Health Organization states you should isolate for 10 days from first having symptoms plus 3 days after the end of symptoms.

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At the time of my writing this post, in Minnesota, we have a test to treat program where you can call, report the result of your rapid test (no photo necessary) and be prescribed paxlovid over the phone to pick up from your pharmacy or have delivered to you. It is free and you do not need to have insurance. I found it by googling "Minnesota Test to Treat Covid"

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Paxlovid decreases the risk of hospitalization and death, but it's also been shown to decrease the risk of Long Covid. Long Covid can occur even from mild or asymptomatic infections.

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Covid rebound commonly occurs 2-8 days after apparent recovery. While many people associate Paxlovid with covid rebound, researchers say there is no strong evidence that Paxlovid causes covid rebound, and rebounds occur in infections that were not treated with Paxlovid as well. I knew rebounds could happen but did not know it could take 8 days. I had mine on day 7 and was completely surprised by it.

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If you start experiencing new symptoms or test positive again, the CDC states that you should start your isolation period again at day zero. Covid rebound is still contagious. Personally I'd suggest wearing a high quality respirator around folks for an additional 8-9 days after you start to test negative in case of a rebound.

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Positive results on a rapid test can be very faint, but even a very faint line is positive result. Make sure to look at your rapid test result under strong lighting. Also, false negatives are not uncommon. If you have symptoms but test negative taking multiple tests and trying different brands if you have them are not bad ideas. My ihealth tests picked up my covid, my binax now tests did not.

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EDIT: I'd highly suggest spending time with friends online if you can, I previously had a link to the NAMI warmline directory in this post but I've since been informed that NAMI is very much funded by pharmaceutical companies and lobbies for policies that take autonomy away from disabled folks, so I've taken that off of here! Sorry, I had no idea, the People's CDC listed them as a resource so I just assumed they were legit! Feel free to reply/reblog this with other warmlines/support resources if you know of them! And please reblog this version!

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I know that there is so much we can't control as individuals right now, and that's frightening. All we can do is try our best to reduce harm and to care for each other. I hope this info will be able to help folks.

[vulpixhoney]

people keep comparing the WatcherTV move to Dropout (for obvious reasons) but I cannot emphasize enough how vastly different the circumstances between the companies is. like astronomically different

• Watcher does not have the years of experience that Dropout/CollegeHumor did. CH as a company formed in 1999. They've been doing sketch comedy since the early 2000s. they were a company, like an actual company with offices and departments and everything. Watcher hasn't even existed for 5 years

• Because CH has been established for that long, not only do they have an established connection to the industry, but they have an established fan base already. People that knew about and were fans of CH for over a decade, before Dropout was even a thought in someone's head.

• When Dropout was in its infancy, CH was still under their parent company IAC, they weren't roughing it completely on their own the way that Watcher is. They were later dropped by IAC, but having that connection and funding in the vulnerable start was important

• CH was still posting sketches and skits on YouTube for free while filling out Dropout's catalog. They didn't hard shift into exclusively subscription based, they continued doing both for the first couple years in order to help get Dropout established. Even now, they still occasionally post full episodes for free on YouTube, including whole seasons of Dimension 20

• They have a large rotating cast that they move between multiple shows. They have a variety of content and a variety of entertainers to be guests on shows. Watcher has 3 guys which the occasional guest

• A big part of this transition is because Watcher's episodes have a high production cost. That's what they claim. That it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to film one episode of Ghost Files. but why?? why does it cost that much?? I get cost of travel for talent and crew but hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode?

• When IAC dropped CH and they went bankrupt in 2020, they only had 7 employees. When Sam Reich bought the company, they only had 7 employees. not twenty five. I'm not advocating for laying off people, but maybe they shouldn't be payrolling more people than they can afford

• also. Sam Reich is very vocal about how Dropout surviving and succeeding was nothing short of a miracle. They didn't get that success because the business model works, they got that success from years of networking, hard work, and pure luck

[nope-body]

.

[headspace-hotel]

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[shadowfoxsilver]

Some quick tips to spotting accounts that are pretending to be a Palestinian needing mutual aid. Please keep in mind that not all of them are scam accounts, and that some may legitimate blogs who just aren’t too knowledgeable on how tumblr works. This guide is based around what I go by when checking certain blogs and usually it’s a quick giveaway the blog is a scam.

1. You was sent the ask as someone who regularly shares Palestine related content such as regular news updates of posts by other Palestinians who are regularly giving updates. You may also get these asks from sharing a popular post that is from the Palestine tag. If you post often about Palestine, you will always start getting these asks. These askers don’t care if you state don’t send the asks. They will anyway. Unfortunately minors also get sent asks.

2. The ask has odd formatting such as having odd quotation marks in it or unusual formatting that may indicate it’s been edited and copied from somewhere else. Often the ask is the same thing as the post itself minus a link to a donation site. These asks rarely change so searching it should pull up if it’s been sent to other bloggers and sometimes the asks are edited only to add new phrases to them in time.

3. The account is almost always a few days old or a week old or long depending on how often they have sent asks. Usually some may even be an hour old and reusing a familiar pfp/ask.

4. The blog has a few Palestine related posts or posts from random tags reblogged to pad out length and then no more. They will have no original posts besides the pinned post while occasionally answering asks that they may have received but otherwise nothing else and no further updates given either.

5. They may have a Linktree link that is called “GoFundMe” as if indicating they have a GoFundMe there. However, they don’t. When clicked on, the Linktree actually goes to a PayPal account whose name may not even match the one their supposed name is. They’ll say it’s a friend, but it’s just the same person not someone else. You’ll see this same name across multiple accounts after a while usually giving away it’s not legitimate even under a different theme.

6. The text used by the blogs are often real stories stolen from legitimate fundraisers and searching parts of it in your preferred search engine should pull up the sources. These sources make no mention of a tumblr account either or don’t have the PayPal account associated with them in the info. Scammers often impersonate a real person in need and will ignore you if you show them the source they copied from.

7. Legitimate Palestinians often link to their own GoFundMe posts that their friends have set up or post links to other social platforms they are found on. They will regularly post updates when possible, post sources to support them when necessary, and also generally have some method of verifying their legitimacy. They may often share links to support others as well or give links to charities that have been shown as reliable. They will have more original posts than just a single pinned one and regularly speak to other tumblr accounts beyond just an ask. Please don’t bother them with asks about possible scam accounts. There are many guides out there that can do that for you if you search. You may find verified fundraisers too.

8. Scammers don’t know anything about Palestine and will often have trouble once you ask them anything beyond the mutual aid post. They don’t know the languages decently and you can tell it pretty easily if you’re one who uses it regularly. Whatever the scammers use is often just copied off the site they got the post from. Sometimes the text is just reused from past scams such as asking for insulin that doesn’t last long.

9. These scammers can and will use names stolen off real Palestinians to look more legitimate and trustworthy. They change names constantly once one of their PayPal accounts is shut down.

10. If you do see a GoFundMe link on a blog, don’t immediately assume it’s a scam just because it’s a relatively new account. Check the post notes to see if anyone’s verified the account yet or wait a bit as it takes time. You likely can search around to see if anyone’s posted anything where the blog has been vetted by others. You may also see if the GoFundMe is referred to on other socials or on lists that compile verified and vetted fundraisers.

Please don’t let these scams deter you from sending support where it needs to go. Even if you can’t donate personally, there are other ways to help. If you are sending money, please make sure that it’s going to where it’s needed and the place it’s sent has been verified accordingly. If you find a blog is a scammer, and have been able to prove it, please make sure to alert anyone sharing the post and report the account.