#big cartel sale

[unwashedace]

My hamster Archimedes is very sick & I am taking him to the vet tomorrow morning. As I haven't had many or any shifts this month at my regular job I am having a sale in my Big Cartel shop to help pay for Archimedes' vet expenses so that I can focus on taking care of my little guy & make sure I am good for June rent.

So when you spend at least $25 CAD you get 40% off your order! This includes items for Pre-Order like my very cute limited edition sticker sheet! Buy yourself a cute little treat and help a little furball out.

Discount Code: ARCHIMEDES

LINK TO MY ETSY!

LINK TO MY BIG CARTEL!

I have had him throughout the pandemic and he was my only companion for 500 some odd days of not seeing anyone in person. He means the world to me.

Pre-Orders will be sent out on June 1st, 2023.

[leegoguen]

Switching from Etsy

Alright y'all... I'm tired of Etsy fees. It was super convenient for the shipping labels but they took $100 of fees for 17 sales last month and that's just not sustainable for a small business like myself. So I'm asking for your opinions! Has anyone used big cartel? I hear good things but I'd love to read some user experiences from both sides (as a seller and a purchaser). I'm considering switching over there as it seems way more reasonable than Etsy's ridiculous fees.

[luxfatale]

✨hey tumblr friends! i’m asking if you could share this post around please? things are really tight right now and i have art for sale! maybe you need a gift or want to treat yourself to some art?

either way, sharing it helps immensely and i appreciate it! here’s some things i have in my store!

i also have tees! you can order them via everpress! (look there they are👁️👇👁️)

[dracononite]

🎄 HAPPY HOLIDAYS! 🎄

Spend $20 on my Big Cartel and get 10% off your order with the code PARTRIDGE 🕊️🎁 This code also works for my Ko-fi shop, without the $20+ purchase requirement

( BUT! consider becoming a $20 member of my Patreon or Ko-fi to get access to my *entire* digital archive, including retired and exclusive goodies! 🌻 ) this holiday sale ends 12/12!

supporters on Patreon and Ko-fi get a special 15% discount code this month which they can use instead, all month long! 🌨️

[blu0nion]

New stuff on my shop soon ;)

Shop will be on maintenance mode until it goes live at 6pm (GMT) this evening

Sale on everything until the 6th!

[holistichiatus]

RAMUNE EXTRAS ARE NOW UP!

very limited stock and I don't know when I'll get more, so grab them quick!

BigCartel

Etsy

I'm also tentatively allowing shipping to the UK through bigcartel ^^

don't forget that all orders placed through Nov 14 with at least one of the halloween starter charms will also ship with a sweet treat 🍬🍭🍫

[shewithbloodofpaint]

"When You're Lonely... I'll Be Lonely Too" Traditional painting I've had stored away for a while is now up for sale on my shop, both the Original and Art Prints.

LinkTree - Find Me Elsewhere on the internet!

[pizzazz-party]

words cannot describe how much i do not want to deal with etsy. their fees are terrible. their customer service is terrible. but unlike big cartel, they can deal with the paperwork that concerns VAT sales. because calculating the tax isn’t really an issue for me, and i already have the correct HS tariff code. it’s just the act of sending the tax through the proper channels that’s a headache.

last year, during the ring pin preorders, i DID actually try to get my shop registered with the UK government. i got as far as “would you like to pay quarterly or annual payments to the royal crown” and “what is your social security number” before tossing in the towel. i’m not sure what i expected. but when the VAT requires everyone outside the UK to register—there is no prerequisite nexus, it doesn’t matter if you sell one thing for a dollar so long as you are a seller stationed outside the European Union, you need to be registered yesterday—I hoped there might be some friendlier option for small time sellers.

so. etsy. but etsy also wants my social security number. which they shouldn’t need for tax paperwork unless i hit the federal yearly threshold of 200 transactions (or $20,000 in sales, US law states whichever comes first).

which is neat to know for fun fact reasons, but this is small hobby-passion project. etsy doesn’t need my deets like that.

[osgon-azure]

I have buttons for sale!

$3.50 per button, but I also have stickers and prints for sale! Come check it out, and if you want buttons, put in an order

[gustysartblog]

Black Friday Sale starting at Midnight EST!

Be sure to check out my wares on my Big Cartel shop! I have stickers, art prints, art dolls, keychains and more!

[prismatic-skies]

✨✨✨ Spend $50 get $10 off entire order!! 3.23 - 3.31.24! USE CODE: THOR10✨✨✨

[dpfantasyzine]

Shop link | Stretch goal progress | FAQ | Ask us

Artists | Writers | Musicians | Merch Artists

Cover art by @zillychu

Pre-order period is upon us! The Zine (and merch! don't forget the merch!) will be available to order until January 23rd, 2025.

More information about the pre-order period and packages under the read more.

With the pre-order period open, we are happy to announce the beautiful softcover printed zine. Full color 200+ pages featuring 26 artists, 12 writers, and 9 musical accompaniments. Merch will be available in the bundles. 

There are several packages available through Big Cartel.

$35 Physical book only

$40 Physical book and digital PDF bundle

$60 Physical book and all merch bundle

$15 Digital book and digital merch bundle

$25 Merch only

Join our Reblog Raffle for a chance to get yours free!

We also have some stretch goal merch that will be included into the bundles at no extra charge once the target sales have been made. More information on the progress can be found on this post or on this page of the sales site.

Artwork credits for merch

Stickers: 

- TourettesDog - Tumblr | Tumblr | AO3

- Oceankat8 - Tumblr

- Dakkapel - Tumblr

- Shidreamin - Twitter | Instagram

Keychains:

- Shidreamin - Twitter | Instagram

- Borf420 - Twitter | Instagram | Youtube

- ComicalCarnival - Tumblr | Twitter

Prints:

- Gilly - Tumblr

- BCToastyyy - Tumblr | Twitter | AO3

- Heidi Pitcher - Website | Instagram

- Zillychu - Tumblr

Stretch goals:

- DoughritoArt - Tumblr | Instagram | Carrd

- Dakkapel - Tumblr 

- Shidreamin - Twitter | Instagram

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

[alythekitten]

My art for the BNHAOnCall zine~!

Fire fighter station after a rescue, Bakugou is busy patching Kirishima up, while the rest of the gang makes fun of "how many he was on mission" 🤣💕

Leftover sales are still open, check it out until you can, on Twitter and Big Cartel ~#BNHAOnCall

[cryptidclub]

"Get your holiday gifts before the post office gets crazy" 20% sale! :-) Running now until Saturday the 30th. (Small business Saturday) A lot of other products are already on sale + discount is applied automatically at checkout! BIG CARTEL SHOP LINK