anakinsafterlife

[anakinsafterlife]

Great news! Belgium today becomes the first country in the world where sex workers can sign a legal employment contract and gain access to all employment-dependent social security (which includes saving for a pension, paid pregnancy leave, paid sick leave etc.). It gives sex workers more rights and makes them less dependent on the goodwill of their employer because they now have state protection through a legal contract.

[anakinsafterlife]

THE TERROR ▸ 1.09 the c, the c, the open c

[anakinsafterlife]

when are they gonna create hrt that turns you into The Character

[anakinsafterlife]

Wrong: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because she was Lord Byron's daughter.

Right: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because that was the closest you could get in 1850 to being a Super Mario 64 speedrunner.

[anakinsafterlife]

suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

[anakinsafterlife]

well it finally happened

so my dad is almost 80, this man's been making Spirk content since Star Trek started airing basically

he never knew ao3 existed, he just thought people stopped writing fanfic when ff.net died, like it was a fad that had outgrown him or smth

he clicked an ao3 link in my pinned last night, realizing that they were in fact clickable

he's mad at me for not telling him earlier. "I don't have a lot of years left in me and there's so much to read"

he's gonna spend his whole retirement reading trek fanfic now jesus christ

[anakinsafterlife]

عندما تدرك أخيرًا أن سلوك الآخرين يرتبط بصراعاتهم الداخلية أكثر من كونه متعلقًا بك، تتعلم الترفّع والتسامح ..

[anakinsafterlife]

@vaderborn no one understands our pain.

Are you kidding me I need to see this cut…the… yaoi of it all…

[anakinsafterlife]

Are you kidding me I need to see this cut…the… yaoi of it all…

[anakinsafterlife]

"Are you single?"

"No."

"Committed?"

"No."

"Then?"

"I'm in a spot where I'm out of relationship but still in love with that someone."

[anakinsafterlife]

Marco Manzella (Italian, b. 1962), Due sorelle, 2019. Tempera on canvas, 70 x 110 cm

[anakinsafterlife]

This year felt like being awake during a surgery

[anakinsafterlife]

Lestat would hate Elon Musk because he has no style or imagination when it comes to spending his wealth, but Armand won't let him eat Elon cause he pre-ordered the cybertruck and doesn't want it to be delayed

[anakinsafterlife]

THE WHEEL OF TIME | Lanfear in 2x07

[anakinsafterlife]

i feel obligated to talk about this bc i am egyptian and one of the central reasons people from gaza have been fundraising is because of egypt's border policy, which is no longer active since the rafah border was destroyed

i know nothing gets people more heated or self-righteous than the idea that they might be getting scammed, and i know the gofundmes here can be overwhelming in your inboxes and i know for many people in the west who want some kind of reliable process this can seem sketchy but palestinian bloggers on here (and palestinians across platforms including on gazafunds.com) don't want you to be scammed any more than you want to be scammed, and they have put in an extraordinary effort to verify information literally in the middle of a warzone

the truth is you all have no idea how difficult this entire process is from top to bottom, tech companies and fintech companies literally hate anything that passes through this area. i'm banned from uber and doordash because i used an egyptian credit card while travelling and it flagged their automated fraud systems and they never reinstated it lol like that's how arbitrary it is. and egypt is one of the better-connected countries in the area.

the entire reason people in gaza are relying on gofundmes is because the barriers to entry and exit are not accidental—they're deliberate! this is literally what being occupied and middle-eastern means. it means you don't have easy access to bank accounts, you don't have easy access to fundraising, you don't have easy access to your own records, and you are automatically mistrusted by the world at large of how thoroughly dehumanized your language and your people have been during a genocide where you are being bombed and living in a tent. this is also part of what it means to be a refugee from the global south or to be a refugee from the global north, where these processes are expedited (as they were for ukrainian refugees, for example) precisely because they are part of the structure of a war.

like just to explain to you guys how difficult it was for me (someone with access to networks across the world) to get money to a friend in gaza, because egypt's also going through an economic crisis and transferring usd here is close to impossible: to get 15k usd (enough to get 3 people out of gaza) to the office in egypt that registers people for evacuation, that family needed

a stable internet connection to communicate with us (they were only able to get in touch briefly every other day)

first-degree relatives in egypt to register for them

people from abroad who could raise the money for them (which they did; they were family friends who knew them)

an egyptian with a usd bank account and a foreigner coming to egypt who could carry usd in cash to divide it among themselves because there is no other way to receive that amount of money here at once

we managed to get the money to their relatives here, they managed to register them, and then the rafah border was destroyed. so now the are just waiting while being bombed and displaced from one area to another. and this is a family who had every connection needed. imagine how it is for people where only one of these links are dropped?

that's why the work the palestinian bloggers do here to support palestinians in gaza is necessary, because they fill in for people who don't have good language skills, who don't have friends abroad to fundraise or vouch for them, who don't have relatives in egypt who can receive money for them, etc

does this mean every fundraiser is 100% reliable? no. this is why the verification list exists! the things i would be wary of would be if someone sends you a false or phishing link, or if someone who is running the campaign from abroad decides to scam the palestinians they're raising it for and refuse to send the money, both of which i've witnessed personally

but the likelihood of someone faking being from gaza and getting onto the verified list is much smaller because the verification process is rigorous and like i said, palestinians themselves don't want to be promoting scams. but also most of these gofundmes protect your donation, meaning if someone disputes it you get your donation back. they are paranoid to the extent that they will sometimes refuse to pay out people in gaza even after the campaign goal is reached for no reason except that anything from the middle east is generally regarded with suspicion. i've seen paypal also refuse to do the same

as a matter of fact from a tech standpoint it's so, so much easier for someone located in the west to create a fake gofundme/phishing scam than for a palestinian to do so, but by that token it's more difficult for someone in the west to convincingly fake being from gaza. which is why the verification list and other initiatives (like again, gazafunds.com) are so important

i have tried to get gofundmes on gazafunds before and i can promise you their process is rigorous. you might not see a lot of the paperwork behind a specific campaign but i know they don't add campaigns unless they verify their IDs personally or through a network of trusted references. the bloggers on here are a volunteer network working independently, of their own effort, and they are doing their best in what is a genuinely horrible situation. the border is closed now but people in gaza have worked out alternate ways to receive money raised online (again, often via relatives transferring to each other outside gaza or other means) and aid hasn't been coming in for months and those regulating the aid were killed, which means extremely limited supplies and high inflation, so money raised and received now is literally survival money that goes wherever it can, and people are very desperate to raise as much as possible as things get more dire. there is no employment in gaza right now. people have been living off their savings for ten months.

is that simple to convey to some blogger on tumblr donating 5$ to a gofundme? is it simple to understand? no. and that's part of the structure of genocide. you aren't going to be able to venmo someone and get a receipt like you do if you're donating to an org, so volunteers are doing their best to fill in the gaps for that by making sure you know how your money is helping real human beings while relieving the pressure on these humans, in a genocide with limited internet, to constantly post about themselves.

the fact of the matter is that your risk of being scammed by a gofundme from the verified list or gazafunds dot com is extremely low, but the damage of of assuming (and even worse, claiming) these campaigns are a scam is extremely high

if you don't trust a campaign, don't donate to it. if you notice a red flag you feel like the bloggers verifying might have missed, alert them to it. if you notice someone impersonating one of the verified campaigns on here (also common) alert people to it. i often have difficulty identifying which blogs are legitimate because they are deleted and remade so frequently, so i just try to reblog posts from the verified list or promoted by palestinians bloggers as i donate to them.

don't cast doubt on the process if you don't understand it, and don't be cruel about a situation you should pray you never experience—and odds are, if you have a US passport and a US bank account, you never will.

[anakinsafterlife]

Wembley Stadium, 1986

[anakinsafterlife]

My Place: Florence Welch