Marco, The Flying Chair

On the 28th of April, 2011, Ed Balls got a Twitter account. He decided (as most people under the spotlight do) to attempted to look up his own name. However, all he did was tweet “Ed Balls”. This, for some reason, got retweeted by THOUSANDS of people. On a global scale. And because he didn’t know you could delete a tweet it stayed. Every year since then,the 28th of April is Ed Balls day. 

This is the infamous tweet

and here are some gems to celebrate that have followed the years, including last year where they framed the tweet and got him to sign it for charity

There are also LOADS MORE in this article from the Telegraph

2. A tweet from edballs, written on 28th april 2011. it reads, “ed balls.”

3. A tweet from nick_clegg: “Ed Balls.” this was followed by a tweet from edballs: “I agree with Nick… RT @nick_clegg: Ed Balls.”

4. Ed Balls’ Wikipedia page edited to have every single word replaced with the phrase, “Ed Balls.”

5. A photo of a selection of birthday cards marked as celebrating the event, “Ed Balls Day.” A tweet from Carousel_Lights remarks: “#EdBallsDay has become so commercialised. Shame really.”

6. A series of Coke bottles. The label on each reads, “Share a Coke with Ed Balls.”

7. A framed and signed version of the original Ed Balls tweet.

8. A photo of two Tesco’s Scotch eggs. A tweet from Tesco describes them as, “Egg Balls.”

• March 14th: Pi Day

• March 15th: Ides of March

• April 1st: April Fools Day and Mishapocalypse Memorial Day

• April 13th: Homestuck Day

• April 20th: Weed Day

• September 8th: Queen Elizabeth Killed By Sans Undertale Day

• March 14th: Pi Day

• March 15th: Ides of March

• April 1st: April Fools Day and Mishapocalypse Memorial Day

• April 13th: Homestuck Day

• April 20th: Weed Day

• September 8th: Queen Elizabeth Killed By Sans Undertale Day

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

In reality, they usually go down to some large submerged floats.

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For example, these four are all the same, with only slight variation in #1:

(I actually have duplicates from some of the "self-identified" anons above.)

But these two anons share the same new stock phrases:

"days are heavy" / "days that feel impossibly heavy."

Not to put too fine a tin foil hat on it, but:

That is the kind of threat someone involved in these kinds of financial scams and the social engineering behind them *would* make! It's a threatening statement to the existence of my blog which usually means heightened fear/anxiety of the target, which makes people more likely to fall for a financial scam. Social shame and embarrassment are also heightened emotions! Bullying works! This would make an excellent social engineering counterpoint (if tugging on heartstrings doesn't work!) and might even be effective on many people!

Sure, you can search the supposed connected usernames those anons claimed and find out specifics that way — but not a single one of those screenshots I showed specifies what they're referring to! The IDENTICAL messages from four "different people" never actually mention what their "family's struggle" even is! There's zero fucking context in the space of those messages. They're all IDENTICAL. I literally cannot be committing denialism about anything specific because those asks don't actually say anything I could be denying. How does this person know that these anons aren't a recently impoverished Nigerian prince?

So now you're asking why don't I just click on the usernames and find out more details? Simple. Because they're fucking fraudsters who sent me the same message like, six times with 4 different usernames attached AS ANONS. Why as anons if they have their own blogs and could send the messages that way? SIMPLE AGAIN: because if they're not logged into the blog accounts, you could have whole teams of people copying and pasting these anon asks to various Tumblr users constantly, and you can probably just bypass the ask limits by changing VPNs or going incognito or something. This is a DEDICATED scam. Is it a bot? MAYBE! But that also would explain some of why it doesn't work *while logged in* to the blog accounts — because being anon probably makes it easier to focus on volume.

Falling for these isn't just an 'oopsy doopsy, you're out some money' sort of a thing. If you send money to obvious scammers and if you platform obvious scammers, you are very likely directly financially supporting modern day slavery. That's not an exaggeration, and I'm not being alarmist. Please read any of these articles on the subject if you don't believe me:

On the 28th of April, 2011, Ed Balls got a Twitter account. He decided (as most people under the spotlight do) to attempted to look up his own name. However, all he did was tweet “Ed Balls”. This, for some reason, got retweeted by THOUSANDS of people. On a global scale. And because he didn’t know you could delete a tweet it stayed. Every year since then,the 28th of April is Ed Balls day. 

This is the infamous tweet

and here are some gems to celebrate that have followed the years, including last year where they framed the tweet and got him to sign it for charity

There are also LOADS MORE in this article from the Telegraph

2. A tweet from edballs, written on 28th april 2011. it reads, “ed balls.”

3. A tweet from nick_clegg: “Ed Balls.” this was followed by a tweet from edballs: “I agree with Nick… RT @nick_clegg: Ed Balls.”

4. Ed Balls’ Wikipedia page edited to have every single word replaced with the phrase, “Ed Balls.”

5. A photo of a selection of birthday cards marked as celebrating the event, “Ed Balls Day.” A tweet from Carousel_Lights remarks: “#EdBallsDay has become so commercialised. Shame really.”

6. A series of Coke bottles. The label on each reads, “Share a Coke with Ed Balls.”

7. A framed and signed version of the original Ed Balls tweet.

8. A photo of two Tesco’s Scotch eggs. A tweet from Tesco describes them as, “Egg Balls.”