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Discoholic 🪩
Janaina Medeiros
Sade Olutola
shark vs the universe
Kiana Khansmith
noise dept.
ojovivo
Kaledo Art
trying on a metaphor
Show & Tell
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
titsay
YOU ARE THE REASON
@theartofmadeline
sheepfilms
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
roma★
No title available
DEAR READER
seen from Indonesia
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seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
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@spookyscaryscouticus
I was thinking of a pride art challenge people could do with their OCs, because I thought it'd be cute! A queer/trans artist with their creations.
but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs
@otiksimr
you and your beasts.
me and my beasts.
@cinemamind
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
remember to bury the dead with a phone, everyone. these days the ferry terminal at the river styx wants you to download a fucking app
Yes yes i know love is love. But they are still killing CHILDREN. over this.
do not go gentle into that good night
be a bit of a bitch about it
something charmingly twentieth century about this
This counts as a spell
Placeable AOE effect
apparently I'm still logged into the work account 3 years after leaving this company
so for my final note, from the bottom of my heart, I just wanna get dicked down again =/
Day 180 since Craig moved in. he clearly thinks he’s dating one of us but we can’t figure out who. it’s possible one of us is lying about it for some reason but so far our efforts at inquisition has led nowhere. we would kick him out but he’s been doing the dishes for us. we’ve decided that for the sanity of the polycule we’ll keep up the charade. if all of us continue to be flirty with him, he’ll project his attraction onto whoever the hell he thinks is into him. this house of cards is delicate but necessary
It got funnier
This is how cats domesticated themselves
it's healthy for academics to have professional feuds. enrichment activity
Holy shit. "The demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes lengege a fecter?" published in the Science magazine
short but sweet
My current career leads me to interact with a lot of older and often more conservative people (rip me) and since it's Me, MASH will sometimes come up in conversation. I'm always shocked by how many of these people love MASH and seem to have fully missed its message like... Did you miss the episode about the gay soldier? Or the feminist themes behind Margaret (in later seasons)? I KNOW you had to see the anti war themes, right? RIGHT?
you guys are so right, I should have added the best part
This meme ages like a fine wine every year that passes.
if you even care.
if your heart is at all swayed.
Sometimes I'll be looking at bullshit online that I know will just rile me up and I have to think of this image to get myself to stop
Btw, that idea that privilege makes you morally evil and suffering makes you morally good is just repackaged versions of the Christian concepts of the evils of luxury and the holiness of martyrdom. Hope this helps!
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.
pasta art
That is. Not the caption I was expecting
PSA
This is not fabric
This is pasta
Daily reminder that economists are useless hacks who should not be listened to under most if not all circumstances
My economics professor just talked about hypothetical relationships between supply and demand and then played YouTube videos and skipped half his lectures
