#i literally crack up everytime #at least ten of the notes are from me
will byers stan first human second
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Jules of Nature
No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
art blog(derogatory)
Sade Olutola
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
cherry valley forever
styofa doing anything

Origami Around
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

No title available
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

PR's Tumblrdome
almost home
Not today Justin

titsay
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
seen from Netherlands

seen from Malaysia

seen from Indonesia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from Netherlands

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore
seen from Australia
seen from Sweden
seen from Greece

seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
@dancinbelle
#i literally crack up everytime #at least ten of the notes are from me
Okay, hear me out.
One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.
So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.
Enter the gray economies.
Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.
Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.
Because what do these groups actually do?
They:
set norms for compensation and contracts
regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting
provide a framework for dispute resolution
establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)
That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.
Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!
The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.
That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.
Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code
Again: not altruism. Stability.
And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.
Which is very historically grounded.
On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.
Pirate codes, for example, often included:
compensation for injury
shared distribution of loot
limits on captain authority
Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).
So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:
The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.
The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.
And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.
If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.
If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.
But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?
You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.
So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.
Which is both deeply funny and a little too real.
#you're telling me han solo is a union man? (via @professorsparklepants)
Han Solo look SO MUCH like a union man.
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
that’s not the whole flag, now is it
hey staff what the fuck
hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose
HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE
no more historic events this decade that is ENOUGH, i’m putting my foot down
History is not done with us yet my friend
I have received all manner of threat, up to and beyond “I will play a flute carved from your femur,” and yet this is the first time I’ve felt truly threatened
i knew posting this in 2022 was risky but holy fucking shit
the best female characters are the ones that online discourse calls annoying and cannot stand. this is a fact sorry. the more hated she is by the online sphere the better her character is sorry
fun thing about getting older as a dedicated lifelong non-athlete: i'm as fast and limber as I've ever been! which is not very. technically I'm in the best shape of my life. that is to say, middling
actually going from deeply-unwell-teenager to reasonably-functional-adult has inured me to the Common Laments of Aging:
"I can't run as fast as I used to" running is sweaty & gross hard pass
"i miss having stamina" you had STAMINA???
"ugh back pain" my inner teenager-with-scoliosis-and-mysterious-bone-pain is unphased
"ugh neck pain" do most people not spend the majority of their lifecycle hunched over screens from puberty onwards? if not that's my bad
"I used to be able to pull all-nighters" chugging energy drinks and depriving your brain of sleep to perform miserable labor is fucked up actually, and shouldn't be normalizd in or outside of college. given half a chance corporations would have your 60-year-old aunt hopped up on caffeine pills retouching powerpoints at 4am. thank fuck we're not expected to be 21 forever
"I used to be so flexible" why
"my metabolism 😭" kill your inner fatphobe, enjoy the comfy extra padding/circulation, buy a cool new wardrobe, and go forth, eat well, and GIVE NARY A FUCK.
"I miss having young knees" that one's valid
In conclusion my personal fitness goals remain, as always: to be able to carry multiple grocery bags, and go for a nice little walk (not jog!) around the neighborhood.
let me rant for a minute about how fucked up it is that "fitness" gets pushed first on teenagers as 1) school sports/athletics (which cause a statistically enormous amount of lifelong injuries) and then as 2) instagram gym culture aka being skinny+muscular for aesthetics. we pretend this is what "health" looks like, and it's not.
fitness & excercise should be about improving your day-to-day life. which means fitness needs vary a lot by individual, age, medical conditions etc. here are just a few examples of what practical fitness goals can look like:
stretches/exercises to reduce pain in daily life (e.g. carrying groceries up a flight of stairs without being sore the next day)
increase mobility (e.g. walking around a museum with fewer rest periods)
increase stamina (e.g. running to catch a bus)
increase muscle mass e.g. to prepare for your 60s/70s, bc apparently that stuff sticks around and makes getting older waaaaay easier
increase balance/flexibility to prevent falls
build/preserve bone density to prevent osteoporosis
general injury prevention, bc that shit sucks
basic maintenance, to help preserve a lifestyle that works for you
screw this anti-aging bullshit. no one needs to be a professional athlete or permenantly 21. what we deserve is to be able to age comfortably and live long, fulfilling lives. fitness is a tool, not a moral duty. it should work for you, not vice versa.
reverse gaslighting where i pretend to know exactly what you are talking about
"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot
i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832
victor hugo would like to have many words with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1831
new kind of guy dropped
he's unironically 100% correct and i will hear nothing against him
I never thought I would be siding with the pope’s involvement in politics and cheering him on. I will say that.
Apollo 17 vs Artemis II
Despite everything, it's still you.
-------------------------------------------------
Also prev tags:
That's really cool actually
#excuse me but are you telling me that the Apollo pic is made with the help of the SUN and the Artemis one with the help of the MOON??? #that's actually so poetic i want to cry
@gorandomshesaid wait i need to sit with this one. wait.
if you put the new harry potter show on my dash in any way it's gonna be an automatic unfollow from me, guys. like. it's 2026. come the fuck on
My friend just sent this in the group chat, we got the new gay or European 2026 update
A rigorous diagnostic. 15 questions. One uncomfortable truth.
okay.
I got the reverse
I hate having an internal monologue. Girl shut the fuck up.
a misogynistic society is so threatened by the concept of trans women - women that "had the opportunity" to be privileged men and chose not to - that they start making up privileges women have in order to explain why trans women exist. going into womens restrooms isnt a privilege, playing womens sports isnt a privilege, lesbianism isnt a privilege, yet they present them as such to try and explain why trans women are women for nefarious reasons. a misogynistic society will never understand that trans women have no ulterior motive for being women
for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits