Appeal for Support

[Garry]

Hi Simmers,

(Dear moderator if this post is not appropriate or in the wrong area please feel free to remove/move as you see appropriate.)

For those that do not know much about me, I have been producing aircraft textures for Flight Simulation for over ten years and pumping out thousands of textures, many of them award winning, for the flight sim community via my website http://www.gjsmith.net for FREE.

Many others textures, through contracts to major sim organisations, personal requests and Virtual Airlines have also been published via my web site.

Feel free to have a look around my site - many hundreds of free liveries available there for your flying pleasure.  The site provides many thousands of downloads each month and has done so for a very long time.

Unfortunately my 7 year old computer gave up the ghost last month, a friend lent me a retired machine to carry on with but as luck would have it - that one crashed last weekend.  (using a neighbours machine to write this)

To cut to the chase, like many others, I have been hit by the global economical downturn.  Impact for me is the rapid decline in texture/graphics contracts, freezing of Superannuation funds and tightening/reduction of Pension etc.

So I am appealing to the simming community for financial assistance via donations to assist me in achieving two goals:

(1) enable me to purchase a mid range replacement computer, and

(2)  to help cover the costs for http://www.gjsmith.net (domain expires in January and to cover in advance the server fees to continue enabling the many gigabytes served each month.)  

Undoubtedly many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of simmers have over the years taken advantage of my texture artwork, graphics support, graphics/simming guidance and tutorials.  Over a thousand textures are available from my site for FREE and I have supported many hundreds of Virtual Airlines and many Flight Sim Conventions throughout the world with my artwork.

What I humbly seek, which I hope is very reasonable, is the urgent support of around 100 people donating $15 to $20 each - this would enable me to purchase a new medium quality machine and fund the gjsmith.net site for another year so that many regular and new simming visitor can have access to my current and future work for the simming community.

How to donate -
(1) via my web site http://www.gjsmith.net/donations.htm  or
(2) direct via PayPal http://www.paypal.com - account: garry@gjsmith.com  

Regards and thank you in advance for your time and consideration of this support request.

Garry J. Smith
aircraft texture tinkerer
email: garry@gjsmith.net
site:    http://www.gjsmith.net

[ShaneG_old]

I for one, will be donating to this fund. I have most of the textures from your site, mostly the Mike Stone repaints, and have been following your tutorials for aircraft repainting with quite a degree of success. The fact that you also provide paintkits alongside your repaints is also a great service to the community.
Lord knows I've thrown $20 away on stuff that was far less of a nobel cause than this one.
It would be a real loss to the communtiy of simmers to loose this man's fine work. So dig deep if you can, and remember, it is Christmas!