@chai-latte-knight - Tumblr Blog

went on the incorrect quote generator, emerged with a bunch of stuff that tickled my pickle (seriously i am laughing so hard)

tashak & josephine

canon compliant nonsense (in my universe stuff goes a bit differently but still this was funny)

now this is tashak compliant :)

of somewhat fallen fortune >:(

Keep reading

cyancees

i have neither a good imagination nor aphantasia, but a secret third thing

three--rings

Also, I’m having to ask myself, do I want to read an entire journal article on the economics of piracy and how pirates used their reputations to avoid violence? When what I set out to do was write and this is not even relevant? Hmmm…

three--rings

Because my cat insists she needs my lap to sit on, I had to defer writing, so I’m reading it. And it’s very useful info for people looking to understand and write about piracy.

So, to summarize:

Pirates don’t want to have to fight a ship in order to capture it. Because, in doing so, they can get themselves hurt or killed and their ship damaged, AS WELL as the prize ship. At worst, if they sink the ship they’re attacking, they lose the entire prize.

So they want people to surrender to them. So pirates promise “if you fight, we will kill you and be very terrible to you, but if you surrender, we’ll let you live and be fine.

So what pirates mostly do is work on building their REPUTATION as bloodthirsty and savage to anyone who resists them, as well as their reputation for kindness to captives. So you get stories about pirates maiming people who threaten them at all. You get stories of pirate being super cruel to anyone who resists them. Mostly cause the pirates WANT those stories out there.

It was so common for people to be treated well by pirates, that the British government had to threaten merchantmen with legal sanction if they surrendered to them, because otherwise everyone would just immediately surrender their goods and get treated super well by the pirates.

The purpose for the Black Pirate Flag, is actually to distinguish pirates from Spanish coast guard (and other government entities) who ALSO raided ships for goods in the same waters. But when they took captives, they couldn’t just kill the ones who had resisted. So it was a better idea for merchants to resist them. So the pirate flag is a warning to say “if you resist US, we WILL kill you, so just surrender and everyone walks away.”

This helps explain captain William Wyer’s crew’s response when Wyer asked his men if they would defend their ship from an unknown approaching belligerent.” [T]hey answered, if they were Spaniards they would stand by him as long as they had Life, but if they were Pirates they would not Fight.” When it turned out that Blackbeard’s pirate crew was the belligerent bearing down on them, consistent with the effectiveness of pirates’ reputation for adhering to their surrender-or-die policy discussed above, “Wyers Men all declared they would not Fight and quitted the Ship believing they would be Murthered by the Sloops Company.”(Boston News-Letter June 9-June 16, 1718)

Also some “coast guards” started using the black flag which is why just possessing one was sentenced by death and used to prove you guilty of piracy.

As one pirate historian notes, “In the great majority of cases merchant ships surrendered without a fight when attacked by pirates”(Cordingly 2006: 121). This suggests the number of pirate poseurs was modest, which explains how the Jolly Roger managed to remain “so effective for pirates that they hardly ever needed to kill”(Pringle 1953: 113).

It mentions fun stories like the pirate captain who managed to take three ships at once without firing a single bullet and the pirate crew of five who managed to take ship after ship despite being VASTLY outnumbered every single time. (And then the author viciously trash talks Stede Bonnet for being a shitty pirate…)

But not being mistaken for a SHITTY pirate crew is why pirates started customizing their flags so they would be recognized.

To prevent crews from hiding or destroying or throwing valuable loot overboard, pirates had to cultivate the reputation of being dangerously unstable and liable to do horrible thing to anyone who tried this kind of thing, and they had to ADVERTISE.

So pirates swaggered a lot in front of captives, talking about how they had little value for their own life, how they liked the idea of a short life, how they intended to blow up their own ships rather than be defeated, etc. It became part of the pirate image to take on mottos like this.

They also acted mad and bad when ransacking ships, throwing anything they didn’t want overboard, tearing up the ship before giving it back to the captains, blaspheming and pissing on Bibles, basically being as punk rock as they possibly could to freak out the normies. (Also they couldn’t really fence ships or really bulky cargo so it helped their reputation to just trash it.)

Even the melodramatics of Blackbeard’s last stand against Lieutenant Robert Maynard, reported in the Boston News-Letter, helped solidify pirates’ image as men on the edge, devilishly hoping for someone to push them over. As the newspaper described it, before engaging Maynard, “Teach called for a Glass of Wine, and swore Damnation to himself if he either took or gave Quarters”(Boston News-Letter February 23-March 2, 1719)

Finally the article talks about pirate torture.

Torture for information was pirates trying to get info about where valuable things were hidden from people who had hidden it. It benefited them for this to be as violent and disturbing as possible so no one tried to hide anything. The second kind of torture is that to punish people who destroyed loot, and that was torture for reputation’s sake, to prevent others from doing the same.

Compliant captives weren’t tortured and were often treated with kindness. Pirates often gave captives gifts when they released them, up to an entire ship.

The final section is entirely about Blackbeard and his reputation:

There is no doubt, one Blackbeard historian notes, that Blackbeard was conscious of the public image he had created and worked diligently to maintain it (Lee 1974: 22).

According to historian Angus Konstam, who has investigated Blackbeard’s life and piratical career extensively, until Blackbeard’s fInal battle with the lieutenant of HMS Pearl, Robert Maynard, who took the bearded icon’s life, the world’s most notorious and fearsome pirate hadn’t so much as killed a single man (2006: 157). His reputation meant he didn’t need to.

Anyway, the point of the article is that pirates were savvy PR manipulators and they acted from rational motives of economics, like both most criminals and also corporations. Yup the entire conclusion section is about the lessons modern corporations can learn from pirates so, I guess economists gonna economist.

guerrillatech

Amazing

fantasysclerosis

la-laborista-republiko

tlaloc

i love that it’s pikachu saying this bc pikachu attained freedom by electrocuting the fuck out of ash and outright refusing to get into the fucking pokeball

sweetd3lights

spitblaze

damnesdelamer

toastbutteregg

callese

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

geeneelee

The fact that microsoft word wags its finger at you for using passive voice and long sentences is very annoying when you’re trying to proofread legal or medical documents, which are nothing but mile long sentences in the passive voice.

heroofthreefaces

I would suggest you turn it off, but I always felt obliged to leave those checks on while I was at work too

geeneelee

The point is that I’m using it for work and my job is proofreading, so unfortunately turning it off would be counterproductive

wordswithkittywitch

You can turn off just the long sentence and passive voice and leave the parts you’re actually going to use.

geeneelee

Holy shit I swear I’ve googled this specific thing before and everyone said “you can’t too bad”

galoogamelady

@soularch and I were talking about things

memewhore

trupowieszcz-moved-deactivated2

pokemon blood and pokemon bone where you osmosis jones your way through some creature to discover microscopic pokemon

bedrock-to-buildheight

I can get behind that

(Top to bottom: tardigrades, staphylococcus aureus, and mash up of various fungi)

the-real-numbers-deactivated202

this but they’re the sole source of disease in the Pokemon universe

the-real-numbers-deactivated202

*doctor places stethoscope on my chest* “Good news and bad news: here’s the good news, I can hear it chanting it’s own name, so diagnosis is easy. The bad news is… you’ve got tuberculosa.”