Warwick Reynolds (British, 1880-1926) - Prosperity

Imagine being a pirate and getting attacked by a group of colonists backed by a cruel DevMode empowered god.

You wake up in the middle of the night to three randos walking onto your lawn equipped with nothing but Temu t-shirts and plasteel knives. You have about ten seconds to get out of bed before all of your turrets just disintegrate. Three of your neighbors ragdoll. Someone’s house just blew up out of nowhere. You watch as the girl you’ve been talking to falls to her knees and ages 300 years in 3.5 seconds then somehow gets high on flake and psychite while miraculously developing severe asthma. You start to run and trip over something, you assume it’s a rock but when you look over it’s your grandpa. He’s been turned into a limbless potato. They weren’t cut off, they’re just gone. He has enough time to shout “Look!!” before you turn around and see your little colony is being Zerg rushed by 25 grizzly bears on go-juice. You start to run again and almost escape before you blink and realize you’re in a 1x1 room surrounded by steel walls and vents. All you can hear are the hums of heaters right beyond the grates and the muffled screams of your dying community. Once that all dies down- and the room you’re in has peaked at a temperature of 280- the last thing you hear is one of the strangers complaining because they didn’t eat with a table.

Lunge Feeding Blue Whales © Gone Whale Watching Inc

The Ultimate Character Design Tournament

Please remember to vote for characters solely based on their design, rather than which character you are more familiar with or like more!

The winner of this tournament will be crowned the first Ultimate Character Design of All Time

Zagreus | Hades

Bunger | Bugsnax

remembering the time I called american psycho (a satirical film about toxic masculinity) a dark comedy and the overwhelming response was 'oh so u think men killing sex workers is funny? u think THAT'S funny?' like no I find a patrick batemen listening to 'i'm walking on sunshine', killing jared leto while wearing a clear raincoat and giving a dissertation on huey lewis n the news, using 'I need to return some video tapes' to get out of awkward situations, throwing a hissy fit about business cards, dropping a chainsaw down a flight of stairs, thinking an atm is telling him to feed it cats, and crying hysterically under a desk is funny. but thank u for ur wonderful insight

Btw, remastering Oblivion it's okay, but I have a question…

Vlaho Bukovac (1855–1922) - Icarus on the Rocks (1897), oil on canvas. 

i'm Zombie i'm almost 30 and i'm famous for having nothing at all to say about anything except what i cannot shut up about

---it/its---

maybe it's just the Radical Rediker talking, but there's something pointed in the way that, say, popular pirate media like Pirates of the Caribbean dilutes the pirate's freedom to "bring me that horizon" as opposed to, say, "plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power" (Bartholomew Roberts).

broadly speaking, most pirates chose the life in order to escape and revenge the hard labour, corporal punishment, overworking, and unequal pay of merchant/navy/privateer ships; or the privations of their sudden unemployment once a war was over, ignored as soon as their ability to die for the state was unneeded. yes, many were thugs, but, consciously political or not, they were responding to a particular, material reality.

the pirate's desired freedom was from the effects of exploitative modes of statehood and capital production. but popular media usually shifts this into a general desire for freedom: freedom to roam, freedom to love (usually merely a cross-class white, heterosexual union), or freedom from the personal pressures of social norms. it's a vague, ahistorical, post-Enlightenment, libertarian ideal rather than a response to a real social and economic situation.

to be clear, this only really applies to specifically the late golden age of piracy, in the first quarter of the 18th century. earlier generations of pirates/buccaneers often displayed nationalist/religious motives, and were lauded, tolerated, or even encouraged by the French and English states for aiding their fights against the Spanish and Portuguese. only the last gasp of age of sail pirates had a truly anti-national energy, and both figured themselves, and were figured by the imperial powers, as the enemies of all nations.

but if we are to valourise the late golden age pirate, at his best, his ideals were for true democracy, and the abolition of nation, hierarchy, and labour exploitation; not "the horizon". he was striking out in response to specific political, social, and economic oppressions, rather than a general individual restlessness, and that reality - and its similarities to our own - are important.

I dunno, I just... have a lot of thoughts about the defanging of piracy in modern media. obviously there were a lot of things bad about them, too, and the level of egalitarianism varied between individual people and ships. but again, if we're going to be valourising them anyway... there were idealists. and they weren't subtle about they wanted.

"I shan't own myself guilty of any murder", said William Fly in 1726. "Our captain and his mate used us barbarously. We poor men can't have justice done us. There is nothing said to our commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like dogs. But the poor sailors --"

on being scared of bugs