writings and art

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.

You personally are against most uses of the death ray. It's one of the most powerful weapons of war in the galaxy, it's capable of destroying entire planets and star systems in a few days, or fleets of ships and continents in mere hours. It's only ever used on planets far from yours, in the savage areas of the galaxy where the rights you have in your comfortable inner world don't exist. It's always people you never meet, never see, you're against it but it feels distant, it's hard to even feel like it's real. You understand what it's like, alien civilizations and human offshoots crushed under a grand imperial boot, planets slowly engulfed by that distant fire, taking days to be destroyed as their cities burn and seas boil until no life is possible on their surface. But you don't know the name of anyone whose been hit by the death ray, they're all millions of miles away.

You don't personally agree with the death ray being used the way it is but you're not responsible for it. You just work on the code, you have to make money somehow, the economy is rough, and someone is going to be hired as a programmer in such a competitive position. Also, you're not 'the guy who fires the death ray' (despite your uncle proudly introducing you as that at one point), you just make sure their code is running properly. You're not a killer, not even part of the military, just someone who programs computers, it would be silly to claim you're responsible for what those computers happen to be used for.

And sometimes people around your age will morally grandstand and naively act like you're more responsible than you are. They'll tell you that you're complicit in something that's too big for you to stop. And you try to tell them that you need a job, that you need to make money, and it's like they think you have freedom that you don't. We're all trying to survive right? Do they just expect you to quit your job because of someone you've never seen before, because of a roll so small, that can so easily be replaced? You can disagree with your bosses, right? Everyone doesn't like their boss.

It almost seems like nobody is the person who chooses to fire off the death ray. When it was being built, when there was a pro-war movement as opposed to people who just didn't like the anti-war movement, there were people who chose to build it, and everything around its first firing was in so many people's hands. But now the death ray is so part of normal life, so mundane, that there's very few people who make choices to support it. There aren't politicians who enthusiastically choose for the death ray to destroy a certain place, just politicians who have to continue supporting the death ray to get reelected, and who can't get anti-death ray laws passed because their opposition will call them soft. There aren't generals who choose to destroy anywhere, just military analysts who figure out what places would serve the empire best to be destroyed using logical and scientific calculations. Nobody's more powerful than the system, and it's nobody's job to decide what the system is, it's just so many people's jobs to figure out how to best make the system work. And the people upstairs in the office need to make sure the press isn't against the death ray because then it might not kill people. And it's the engineers' downstairs job to make sure the death ray doesn't overheat because then it won't kill people. And you fix code because if the code is broken, if you weren't maximally competent, the death ray might fail to kill, it might be off, and fire into empty space, and lives would be saved. It's a massive gun with no trigger. People working at hospitals are told they're saving lives. People working in libraries are told they're helping people learn. Even people working for porn companies get to know that they're getting people off. But everyone you work somehow believes that their job does nothing, that they have no consequence, that they mere watch what's happening happen but have made no choices, because the choice they want to make would go against their interest, their actions are thus not theirs'.

You met a girl once from the outer worlds, and she was mad when she found out where you worked. And you thought that she was just another privileged kid who didn't understand your job. But then she told you that she was from a world that was destroyed. She told you she barely got out in time. She said that it first came like a heatwave, but it kept getting hotter. She saw the streets she once walked as a child consumed by fire, knowing she would never walk them again. The river she has seen every day outside her window, a holy river in her culture, dry up, as dead fish were cooked in its bed. It worked so efficiently thanks to code you'd written. She saw her childhood friend take their own life rather than die from the heat. She had to choose between taking her younger brother or younger sister on the escape pod, chose the one she thought would be more likely to make it. You told her you work there because you need to money to survive. She told you she had to kill people to get a spot on that shuttle, wielding a ceremonial blade she never expected to use. You told her that you don't enjoy doing this, you have to for your job. She told you that she doesn't care if the people who killed her family enjoyed it or not, she just cares that they killed them.

barbie in the 12 dancing princesses! -

Barbie as Odette from Swan Lake and Genevieve from The 12 Dancing Princesses!

They thought it was a sci-fi game but they also thought the monsters were going to be zombies.

Over a period of 2 hours they then proceeded to make EVERY Aliens movie cliche "mistake" known to man. Because at the time they all made sense.

The characters in a story don't know they're in a story or what kind of story it is.

“Nope,” the blacksmith shakes his head. “Nothing but battle mages around here, and I’m the only artificer in forty miles.”

The traveller tugs on her grimy hair in frustration. “You don’t sell potions or amulets or sigils?”

“Wouldn’t know how to make ‘em,” he shrugs, looking at her with some concern. She looks in desperate need of a meal and a good night’s sleep.

“This place is spoken of as a bastion of magic! A font of innovation and power!”

“Well, I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I’ve got more magic in here than one person could possibly need. Provided you need it forged into a blade,” he replies.

It’s getting rather hard not to take her dismissal personally. He would never have expected someone like her not to value the crafting of magical weaponry; he has never seen anyone look more like a sellsword.

“You have nothing else?” she presses and this time there is desperation at the edge of her voice.

“Sorry…”

All the light seems to leave her eyes. Her head drops and the blacksmith can just make out a frantic stream of muttered words.

“Two months on the road,” she breathes, “dragging him from pillar to post as he wastes away, and there’s not a drop of healing magic in this damned place—”

“Heyday! I never said that!” he protests, urgently stepping forward. “You came here with someone in need of healing?”

Her eyes dart instantly up to his. “Yes. My— My charge. He is affected by some curse or illness… Something my skill could not protect him from.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” the blacksmith grins. He looks at her, sizing up the width of her shoulders. “Know how to handle a broadsword?”

“Of course I do.”

He takes one from its case, the flawless blade almost black, the glint of the steel almost warm as he offers it to her.

Anyway now I have something to show people who are blessed enough to not deal with this and maybe they’ll get it!!!!

Katara from ATLA

Here is my pitch. This system:

doesn't introduce the complex electoral maths of proportional representation and other ranked voting systems

forces candidates to put forward a positive case for their position instead of a negative case for the opposition

allows for a more nuanced choice by voters, giving more direct mandate to the winners

could use all the same counting infrastructure as current elections

what is this miracle? simples. 1 man 2 votes. I call them the Best and Worst votes.

you vote for the candidate you most want to win, as in any election. then you vote for the candidate you most DON'T want to win. not a ranked voting system. Two votes. A Yes vote AND a Fuck Off vote.

count time, we probably get rid of anyone who gets less than a 5% vote share TOTAL (this is to avoid a turbocentrist situation where the best way to win an election is to have nobody notice you and never express an opinion). THEN we calculate NET votes for each candidate (ie a For is 1 vote, an Against is -1). obviously whoever has the highest net total wins.

obviously the main advantage is that this allows equal weight to both strong positive feeling (I Like This Guy) and strong negative feeling (Anyone But Farage!!!) whereas the current system treat then as interchangeable. and then labour twats could shut up about 'hold your nose and vote for the Less Evil Neoliberals or the fascists win!!!' because you can just. register a vote that you would prefer Not Fascism, and get on with voting for a party whose policy you actually LIKE. and maybe flyers would lay out what a party stands for instead of 'ONLY PARTY X CAN BEAT THE BAD PARTY!!!' so voters could make like. Positive informed decisions. and so could parties!!!!

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.