Some verified Gaza GFMs on Tumblr!

These gfms belong to organizers who have reached out to me and all of them are nowhere near their goals, there are a few more I'm going through right now but these are all verified. Please share and donate to help these families.

@ahmadturk00 is a verified gfm! Mohammed Skaik is raising funds for his cousin and their family to evacuate Gaza - Ahmad Al Turk's family is made up of seven people and are currently living in a tent - they are a newer gfm and need urgent support. (€1,332/ €70,000 - 4/30/2024)

@hlabarka is also a newer GFM but has been completely verified, she is raising the funds to evacuate with her three-year-old daughter and her husband from Gaza and into Egypt, she and her family have been forced to relocate in Gaza seven times. ($1,112/ $50,000 - 4/30/2024)

@maisonhijazi is organizing for Hamdi, a father in Gaza who is trying to evacuate his children to safety - they just had a baby girl while displaced in Gaza. Please help him get the funds he needs to evacuate his family to Egypt. ($6,852/$25,000 - 4/30/2024)

@mohammedfamily87  Tareq Abu Obaid is organizing for his friend Mohammad Mousa, Mohammed is trying to evacuate his three children and his wife - his house was airstriked back in October, and has lost several members of his family already. (€170/€80,000 - 4/30/2024)

@ahmednabubaker is organizing for Yusuf, an eight-year-old boy who is being threatened with kidney failure, and Yusuf's family - this campaign is for Yusuf and his family to be evacuated to Egypt so Yusuf can be treated and receive a kidney transplant. This is extremely urgent. (€1,489/€85,000 - 4/30/2023)

For a longer list of GFMs that have been individually verified, @el-shab-hussein has a huge masterlist of GFMs to check out and support

Red river hog

Karlach the SECOND you stand still lol

Volume up!

"I'm coming with you, Lettow."

And another commission done by 我唯一的神 @schwarznummer1 , this time for Prince Lettow/my Gangrel MC Myra.

不说英文了，圆梦时刻！！！！！灵子！！！！！！*飞吻*

Yeah between the bear tie. Charity. The drill sergeant. Carpenter talking to Shrue like they're swingers and the 'yeah we gotta kill val' this episode was hysterical but in like, the old definition

I'm sorry silt verses writers but you're going to tell me adjucator cross was wearing a BEAR TIE this entire time?!

honestly this is the funniest possible way to bring charity back into the narrative. she's having an unrelated conversation in a bar, sees the plot walking in the door, and ditches her date without anything else said. masterful. wonderful. i hope she doesn't show up again and this is legitimately the last we see of her.

ALSO love how, much like Sid Wright in s1, Chuck Harm isn't just staying a voice on the radio played in the background in certain episodes. Sid Wright breaks into the narrative by the end of s1 and changes events drastically because of it. Meanwhile, Chuck Harm is over here getting dragged into the narrative whether he likes it or not. These characters are not above the stories they're in!!

"I laugh when I look at this shot - one in a million chance of capturing the precise moment when these birds are locked in eye to eye!

Out in my boat fishing one morning, I noticed that an eagle was being harassed by a blue jay on the shoreline next to my cabin. The blue jay’s relentless attacks were only mildly irritating to the eagle. The big bird’s facial expression was one of pure disdain. Jays are fiercely territorial - the eagle had perched near the jay’s nest and the jay was determined to protect its young.

My boat floated closer and closer to the skirmish and I knew that I might be able to capture a special moment if I just kept shooting. I love the image for so many reasons. The eagle is protecting its most valuable secret weapon - its eyes - by sliding a thin membrane over its eye just as the jay flies by. The jay is executing a ninja move as it makes its escape. And I love the way the image illustrates the sheer contrast in size between the enormity of the eagle’s body and the small silhouette of the blue jay.

I’ll always be thankful that I was in the right spot at the right time."

📸Ken Wiele

I have been so depressed lately I haven’t been able to post any sturgeons but I saw this on the Great Lakes aquarium Instagram his name is CRACKERS he is a BELUGA STURGEON they are TARGET TRAINING HIM so that he can eventually enter a sling comfortably to get his checkups!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HE IS A HOOP GENIUS!!!! GENUIS AT GOING THROUGH A HOOP!!!!!!!!

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

happy april 30th!

This is how it happened right ?

(Also very much based on this post.)

This is the funniest episode of TSV to date I swear to god

“Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.’”

— Tom Stoppard, University of Pennsylvania, 1996 (via flameintobeing)

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

hi just wanted to show you my oc cause i love him sm (so I made his life a living hell)

how do you look like that at 34 daym 😒

helping his lady ☺️what a gentleman

suffering (he didn't deserve this but im glad he's in pain🙏)

sketch for my uni btw (they were not happy)

with his horse and adopted son <3

ty that's it bye

all of this is from 2022-2023