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August 14: Step one-crash boat. Step two- become the local cryptid. Step three… profit?

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Chattel slavery is an incredibly cruel and dehumanizing system.

So is every other kind of slavery.

This doesn’t diminish the awfulness of what people were forced to endure under chattel slavery.

I just think it’s useful to remember that cruelty is complicated and diverse and just because a cruel system is different doesn’t make it right by any means.

Roman slavery operated differently from slavery in the antebellum American south which operated differently from slavery in the Ottoman Empire which operated differently from modern prisoner chain gangs.

In the unit about physical work, he points out that work is, at its core, a measurement of labor, and that labor which isn’t done by a paid laborer had another name before the rise of automation: slavery. He has his students quantify the amount of physical work that you might expect out of a human slave, and then sets them to work calculating what that means for their own standard of living. If you wanted to live like you currently do in the ancient world, how many slaves would you need? Calculate your washing machine in slaves. Calculate your dishwasher in slaves. Calculate your refrigerator and your TV and your HVAC in slaves.

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.

These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.

After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?

Turns out, not so much.

Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”

And maybe it was obvious to them.

I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.

But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!

When I was in library school ten years ago, 2016, the Boston Public Library had recently gone through a scandal, as stated in the tags, where it was believed a couple of prints by the artist Albrecht Dürer, German artist from the late 1400s and early 1500s, was stolen. This was a BIG DEAL because like, who steals from a library, but also HOW, and of course the prints were VERY VALUABLE. Also, this is also the city where 30 years ago a couple guys walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and just. Took paintings off the wall. And left. So that was still in the public memory.

After further investigation, the prints were discovered! Yay! Where were they?

In the same room they were supposed to be in.

Three shelves away.

The box they were stored in was put on a different shelf from where they were supposed to go, and when someone went to look for the box, it wasn't where it was supposed to be, and they couldn't find it, so. OBviously it was stolen.

Anyway. This whole incident revealed just how poorly the Prints & Photographs collection at the BPL was organized.

Which is to say: it wasn't.

The last person in charge of the collection was extremely interested in acquisition, but not so much in the organization and storage of said acquisitions. Which is. You know. The whole point of a library. It wasn't just him, though. There was virtually no cataloging of the collection. For decades, the prints and photographs were just kind of... put in the collection room. A very safe climate controlled room, to be sure, and (mostly) in archival folders and boxes, but apart from a few labels on shelves, and a single old card catalog that was extremely vague and out of date, the entirety of the collection's organization method was essentially "well I always put this box on this shelf here, so that's where it goes." And new things? Just went wherever there was space.

The whole "oh no the Dürers were stolen oh wait no they weren't" thing was an extremely public revelation of the horrifying state of the collection. So the BPL decided to start from the ground up and fully inventory, catalog, and appropriately organize the collection. One of my professors in the Simmons LIS program was hired to run the inventory efforts, and she hired her grad students to do it, and I was one of those grad students.

So for six ish months, I had a part time job going into a secret locked room in the depths of the BPL, picking boxes off a shelf, recording where I got the box from, what was in the box, what state those things were in, and then putting it back on the shelf.

There weren't just shelves though. A previous head of the collection was... very into circus stuff? Like... I don't know. But some of the prints were old circus advertisements and there were cardboard boxes of... idk. Circus toys and stuff. And we had to go through them, because they were part of the collection. WHY were they part of the collection? No idea. That wasn't our job. Just go through the clowns, guys. Gotta put it in the Excel spreadsheet, and then it's the cataloger's problem.

There were way more just. Random cardboard boxes. I don't really remember how many, but enough that you're like "jeez guys, this is your JOB. what the fuck are you doing." But we had to go through them, because that WAS our job.

One of these cardboard boxes had a false bottom.

Now, wait. I need to clarify. This isn't an archival box. This is a plain Jane corrugated cardboard box.

With a false. Bottom.

Why?

It was hiding letters.

Love letters.

Written to the previous head of the collection.

From woman who was not his wife.

At the time, they were both still alive, and they were both still married.

And these letters were... well. Purple prose and flowery romance and we DID do dramatic readings of a couple but not all of them. There were definitely Harlequin Romance level descriptions of intimate moments. Our supervisor very wisely made us all go back to our work and took care of the letters herself.

Did they get inventoried?

Maybe.

I honestly don't know.

But also WHAT THE HECK.

I hope BPL learned their lesson and has gotten more serious about inventorying and cataloging their stuff as a result of all of these shenanigans.

This means that her cycle is 28 days exactly (16+17-5) and that her last period began on July 28th 2006. That was also her last period EVER btw because then she got pregnant and then was immediately changed.

So I counted backwards to every single one of Bella’s periods, from her last one before she changed, to the first one after she moved to Forks. The results:

To elaborate, Bella was on her period:

When she first met Edward at biology class (January 18th 2005)

At the meadow (March 12th) and baseball game (March 13th)

The first time she heard Edward’s voice in NM (January 16th 2006)

When she bought the bikes and she started repairing them with Jake (January 17-18th)

When she and Jacob did homework together and she invited him to the movies (February 14th)

The day she realized Jacob is a werewolf (March 11th)

Quite possibly when she jumped off the cliff, depending on how long it lasts for her (March 16th)

When  Jacob confronted Edward and Bella about the treaty and gave Bella back her motorcycle (April 7th)

When Edward caught Riley’s scent at Bella’s house (June 2nd)

At the Quileute bonfire (June 3rd)

When Jacob went missing in BD (Late June/Early July)

You see a post like this? Where OP might hurt/kill themselves? You hit that button that I circled

Hit that.

Click Suicide or Self-harm Concern

Yes.

Fill in the rest of it, and hit submit. The "content you reported" will fill itself in

Tumblr will follow up and help them.

Warning: this is only for mobile. If anyone knows how to do this for desktop, please add it!

This could SAVE SOMEONE'S LIFE.

YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO REBLOG THIS.

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK IF IT DOESN'T GO WITH YOUR BLOG'S THEME.

And yes, REBLOG. Liking does no shit at all. This isn't ig.

You reblog, people see it. You don't, people don't see it. This shit's that simple.

This could legitimately do so.

“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.