Supreme Ruler

10h

Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.

They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).

And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.

I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.

They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.

It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.

They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.

This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.

It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.

Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.

So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.

Other dudes had been calling him Beaker as an insult for months.

And then the Muppets hosted.

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

I didn't see this personally but he's apparently read out the Onion's announcement, which is a fake article by a fake corporation, out loud several times as if it was real. Anyway it should be noted how screwed he is, bc...

...while he can livestream under his own name, they own his warehouses of dubious supplements. He has nothing to sell but t-shirts protesting that his show is going down. Since Infowars was, first and foremost, a lifestyle brand, this leaves him, scientifically speaking, "totally fucked". He doesn't have ads, that's the only way he makes money

Les sphinx au dictionnaire   -   Francine van Hove

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

Kira gets so irate he launches into a rant where Perry the Platypus can hear him. Doof walks into the room mid-fight, and while he never actually understands what Perry has against the kid, if a platypus tells you to square the fuck up, you square the fuck up. The lab blows up in a way that incriminates Light in a dozen Kira-unrelated crimes and he gets arrested.

okay yeah you’re kinda right—