here’s an HD creditless samurai champloo opening just because it’s so aesthetically pleasing

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todays bird
will byers stan first human second
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

titsay
art blog(derogatory)
RMH
tumblr dot com
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
wallacepolsom
Cosimo Galluzzi
i don't do bad sauce passes
Claire Keane
YOU ARE THE REASON
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Game of Thrones Daily
NASA
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dirt enthusiast

shark vs the universe
seen from United States

seen from Italy

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@sun-kitten
here’s an HD creditless samurai champloo opening just because it’s so aesthetically pleasing
‘am i Having A Brain Problem or Being a Shithead’: a short procrastination checklist
aka why tf am i procrastinating on The Thing (more like a flowchart, actually)
lots of people who have executive function difficulties worry about whether they’re procrastinating on a task out of laziness/simply wanting to be a jerk or mental struggles. this checklist might help you figure out which it is at any given time! (hint: it’s almost never laziness or being a jerk.) (obligatory disclaimer: this is just what works for me! something different might work better for you.)
1) do I honestly intend to start the task despite my lack of success?
yes: it’s a Brain Problem. next question
no: it’s shitty to say one thing & do another. better be honest with myself & anyone expecting me to do the task.
2) am I fed, watered, well-rested, medicated properly, etc?
yes: next question
no: guess what? this is the real next task
3) does the idea of starting the task make me feel scared or anxious?
yes: Anxiety Brain. identify what’s scaring me first.
no: next question
4) do I know how to start the task?
yes: next question
no: ADHD Brain. time to make an order of operations list.
5) do I have everything I need to start the task?
yes: next question
no: ADHD Brain lying to me about the steps again, dangit. first task is ‘gather the materials’.
6) why am i having a hard time switching from my current task to this new task?
i’m having fun doing what i’m doing: it’s okay to have fun doing a thing! if task is time-sensitive, go to next question.
i have to finish doing what i’m doing: might be ADHD brain. can I actually finish the current task or will I get trapped in a cycle? does this task really need to be finished?
the next task will be boring/boring-er than the current task: ADHD brain. re-think the next task. what would make it exciting? what am I looking forward to?
I might not have enough time to complete the task: ADHD brain wants to finish everything it starts. (if task is time-sensitive, go to next question)
i just want to make the person who asked me to do it angry: sounds like anxiety brain trying to punish itself, because I know I’ll be miserable if someone is angry at me. why do i think I deserve punishment?
no, I seriously want to piss them off: okay, i’m being a shithead
7) have I already procrastinated so badly that I now cannot finish the task in time?
yes: ADHD brain is probably caught in a guilt-perfection cycle. since I can’t have the task done on time, i don’t even want to start.
reality check: having part of a thing done is almost always better than none of a thing done. if I can get an extension, having part of it done will help me keep from stalling out until the extension deadline. i’ll feel better if I at least try to finish it.
no, there’s still a chance to finish on time: ADHD brain thinks that I have all the time in the world, but the truth is I don’t.
reality check: if i’m having fun doing what I’m doing, I can keep doing it, but I should probably set a timer & ask someone to check on me to make sure I start doing the task later today.
8) I’ve completed the checklist and still don’t know what’s wrong!
probably wasn’t honest enough with myself. take one more look.
if I’m still mystified, ask a friend to help me talk it out.
hope this helps some of you! YOU’RE DOING GREAT SWEETIE DON’T GIVE UP ON YOU
This is…entirely too real lol
The Mood™ among event creators today.
tonight on final fantasy xiv
The Hound of Ishgard by VVernacatola
Have a safe and boozy Halloween! (via VinePair)
I HAVE BEEN SEARCHING FOR THIS ALL MY LIFE.
bourbon and kit kats are real
It’s that time of year again…
Laughing at Tootsie Rolls.
it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are. This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached. No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you. Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
The Land of Entrapment
here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink
pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water
pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there
dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there
meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing
and sometimes in the old places, the oldest places, where the salt-odor of woodsmoke and tobacco never quite go away, there is unexplained music in the night, and you should not try to find out where it’s coming from.
@gallusrostromegalus
The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
here in minnesota
We’re fucking what now
colorado is a strange sort of place, a passing-through kind of place, a place that holds just as many people who stay as leave. the highways stretch like ley-lines or the lines of old palms; 25 north and south, 70 east and west, 76 and 470 and 285 curling all around and tangling in the middle like loose thread
the mountains are their own place, the plains their own, too, with the hogback and the foothills in between like a strangely-comforting barrier, “this far, and that’s enough. this far, and you’re still close to home. this far, and no further.” the people in the mountains rarely make the plains; the people in the plains rarely make the hills, and the people in the middle rarely leave the developments which spread outward every year like creeping moss.
Summertime in California, when it’s 110 and you wake up in a sweat at 7am and can’t fall back asleep regardless of how much sleep you actually got. You open a door or a window and smell smoke. The air is hazy, the sky is orange, the sun bright red. You go back inside. You stay inside. You don’t worry about the fire, it’s probably miles away. The smoke lasts for days and even after a shower you can’t get the smell out of your nostrils, can’t get the taste off your tongue. You hope your neighbor doesn’t mow his lawn, you hope no one throws a cigarette out a window on your road, or lets a loose chain drag behind their truck.
The wind picks up, you get nervous. a helicopter passes low overhead, you get anxious. You wait for sirens. You watch more helicopters carrying heavy sacks of retardant, tanks of water, and keep testing the way the wind blows. Somehow, the fire misses you this summer.
Wintertime in California. The yellowed, crackling grass that looks like miles of sand dunes turns gray and falls loose from the baked earth. You pray for rain but you beg that it doesn’t come with lightning. Still, you don’t expect rain because every winter is “dry.” Snow falls somewhere in the mountains where someone skis then comes back and tells you it wasn’t much. No rain means more fire in the summer.
Then, after New Year’s, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and won’t absorb water after an hour of moderate rain. The water rises. It fills streets, houses, threatens levees and dams. After days of this the ground finally softens. The plants, their root systems shriveled and mostly washed away by the flooding, can’t hold the dirt in place. Where it has no choice,the earth gives way to landslides.
The Sierra Nevadas, riddled with abandoned gold mines and in some place stripped by hydraulic mining. The water is always tainted with mercury and alkali. Occasionally a mine collapses and a sinkhole appears. If the house shakes you ask your friends and neighbors if they felt it too, but then you forget it happened. You actually sleep through most tremors.
Everyone knows at least one old mining song. School projects and field trips are to Fort Sumter and the missions. Cracking adobe that predates the country. You can tell vultures apart from other birds of prey easy because they’re the ones you see most often. Orchards that go on for miles and towns built on top of old olive orchards—occasionally a business or private home has kept a few to remind you. They don’t plant them. Those are the original trees.
You’re hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fenceposts that look like they were used for target practice with a machine gun. You hear what sounds like a lawn sprinkler go off and you get as far away from the rocks as you can, watching where you step.
Sacramento is a concrete jungle of one way streets and sky-blocking towers before endless miles of ugly industrial wasteland. San Francisco is a twisting maze of clogged overpasses where you drive three miles an hour and watch a dense blanket of bonechilling fog climb over the hills and obscure everything before you enter the city and keep your foot pressed flat to the brake at the steepest intersections. LA is a fever dream, a knotted nightmare of traffic you can never escape, air you can’t breathe even when there’s no fire, and someone’s always playing Norteño, which sounds exactly like polka but with melancholy Spanish lyrics.
The Central Valley gets funnel clouds that touch down even less often than snow falls, but you remember once as a kid getting sleet in the Valley and thinking that’s what snow was then later hudding in the school cafeteria because of a tornado warning. You remember visiting the ocean and bringing home kelp and colored glass. In the mountains you found a sticky pinecone the size of your head and a snake with miniscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are giant statues of golden bears at the state fair, and someone’s always going missing from Modesto.
But in the springtime, the hills are orange and purple and you realize that oak trees are actually green once a year. The heavy wind makes the grasses sway in waves and it sounds like waves and you’re nowhere near the ocean anymore, but it’s right there, endlessly green and almost sentient. The hills are moving.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast…
New Jersey: there’s literally a demon living in the long stretch of woods that runs up and down the state. we’ve befriended it.
San Diego. The ocean is blue, except where it isn’t, where it’s just a touch of dark green, in exactly the place your eye tries to focus. Go inland fifteen minutes and it’s scrub-land, irrigated enough that you’re not supposed to see the desert and the cactus waiting, always waiting their turn. The hawks are there too, and they don’t give a damn. They’re waiting and they don’t care if you know it.
There are mountains with giant boulders cleaved in half—to make a path for the freeway, they say. But maybe, at night, the boulders move.
West Virginia: Almost like a crib rolling mountains that time has whittled into looking like hills trap you in. You’re boxed in and they control everything. You don’t see the sky upon the horizon until they decide to show it to you.
The people here are just like the mountains, quiet, and selective about what they tell. And none of us asks any more questions than we need to. We know better than to follow the haggard people walking down the road with two shovels in hands. We know better than to stare at a man and a woman handing each other, something, in front of a graveyard behind the stop sign.
In Ohio, something walks behind the corn. Possibly multiple somethings. Possibly many, MANY multiple somethings.
They have shiny eyes that reflect your headlights. When you see them, you look away as fast as you can. DO NOT MEET THE GAZE OF THE THINGS IN THE CORN.
Corn is planted in neat rows. It should be child’s play to find your way through a corn-field. Just pick a row and walk down it until you hit the end. And yet, people get lost in cornfields all the time. Sometimes people even DIE lost in cornfields, though this is less common in the age of cell phones. And if your cell phone just happens to lose signal at the place where you are CERTAIN you have walked the rows at least twice as far as the cornfield should logically stretch… keep walking, friend. Just keep walking.
If you find a scarecrow in the field, treat it with respect. Then walk away. Straight away. Don’t look back. DON’T LOOK BACK. Do not look down at the corn fields at night. Do not look for the scarecrows while you are sitting on your bed in the small hours, looking out your bedroom window. If you see them, they will know it. If you see them, you may see things that you cannot forget.
Texas is a land of ghosts and lies. Foreigners imagine a vast, flat desert when there’s no desert in the state: the prickly pear cactus sprawls between oak trees and mesquite, and the climate swings from tropical to arid in the course of a year. They imagine horses instead of traffic worse than Manhattan; they imagine vast blue skies instead of all this smog. They imagine a Stetson on every head and yeah, sure, maybe once you’re out in the steppes, but most of the time that one’s a lie, too.
Everywhere is haunted. We touch the visor and lift our feet off the floorboard and pedal as we roll across a railroad track. We drive out to the crossroads in the dead of night with flour on the trunk’s lip to see the tiny handprints of dead children trying to push us out of the way. We see things in the shimmering curtains of heat that aren’t there when we blink. I’ve seen things moving in the fields in the dark. There are so many churches, dead and living, because frightened people will pray to one ghost to keep the rest of them at bay.
People know which way to hang horseshoes around here. It’s a U-shape, so the luck doesn’t spill out. I think I must have hung one upside-down once.
The stars at night are big and bright and so are the eyes reflecting the porch light out among the trees.
And if you think that’s scary, try living here when you’re Black and/or queer.
Pacific Northwest- more people just plain disappear here. The trees and mountains eat sound and attempts at civilization at an almost violent rate, lone feet still wearing sneakers wash up on the beaches.
And I’ll just repeat what @gallusrostromegalus said:
The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
Hoosiers, that is to say for people who don’t know, Indiana natives, don’t really know what their homes are built on. It looks like fields, so it must be fields, as far as the eye can see, but what most no longer realize is that Central Indiana is old, old swampland. The elevation is low, and the water table is high, atop a state-sized slab of limestone that’s still packed with fossils. The entire region lies on the billions of skeletons of an ancient ocean. We forgot. The land never did. It rains, and suddenly the fields are flooding, drainage ditches failing, streams long-plowed-over flowing over banks of drowning corn and soy. It’s going to be an ocean again, damn it. Worms float to the top, robins rejoice loudly, and underneath every house, a sump pump thrums, desperately shoving fertilizer-foul water against the slow brown tide. If it gets as high as your floorboards…well, you’re ruined, that’s just how it is.
You hope it doesn’t get that high. It’s not like you can afford to replace the entire floor, not in one of the most broke states in the country. Might as well just vacate – nobody will buy it – and let it join the ranks of the other falling-apart house frames, and someday some bored kid will torch it. (That’s happened twice in my hometown while I was growing up. Arson is a sadly common pastime in a place where standing around at Walmart counts as high entertainment.)
I found a spring, once, on top of a hill in a trailer park as a child. You wouldn’t expect one there at all, but there were three patches of cattails nearby where even the bulldozer couldn’t tame the swamp, and the water rolled down the hill into the mud. I accidentally stepped right into the source, and my shoes sucked in up to the ankle. I had to get three other kids to pull me and my shoes loose separately.
The fields near my hometown – a flyspeck of 180 people on a good day, with neither stop sign nor light on the main highway – are orange with hard clay, and gray with limestone. But take the highway to the nearest town, and the Blue River, and the soil is black as coal in the tiny valley, rich with silt. The Blue River is fifteen feet across, but it floods like a miniature Nile. Nobody told it that it shouldn’t be a mile broad. It hasn’t forgotten either.
There’s a bridge near my old church with no sides. There’s a covered bridge built in 1829, if memory serves, not that far from it. It survived an arson in the mid-aughts that stripped the sideboards but didn’t even begin to touch the old-growth frame, solid as stone and still flexible despite its age. There’s an iron frame bridge near it that you can only find if you’re very carefully not looking for it. There are road signs on which I swear I’ve watched the letters change when I went looking for the iron bridge while it wasn’t feeling sociable.
It’s never actually feeling sociable. It just gets too lazy to move when the sun’s out and warm, I’m convinced. At night, it wakes up and I think it resents the tractors that rattle across it all day in the spring and fall.
Wooly worms cross the roads this time of year. All in the same direction, going nowhere I can discern. They say you can tell how long and harsh the winter will be by the size of the black stripe on their middle. I don’t think that’s necessarily true…but I do think I’ve seen a lot more all black ones when I’ve visited lately.
And don’t get me going about the Native mounds. We’ve destroyed more of those than we’ve ever enshrined in parks, and I don’t think we’ve been forgiven for it, nor should we be.
Hoosiers have forgotten the swamp, but the swamp forgets nothing. It’s just waiting for one terminal, apocalyptic rain to wipe Indiana off the map, and then it’ll be back to business as usual for another geological epoch, as far as it cares.
The Rising (2018) - The Calamity Retold
Dear everyone who is currently working on a Thing, whatever that Thing may be,
Good luck with the Thing. You can do the Thing. You will do the Thing. You just have to do the Thing.
Best wishes,
Someone who is also doing a Thing
Thought I’d try something new and do a little walk-through of the favorite part of my house! AKA: how many hallways can one person fit into their home. Also, I had to rush this since tumblr only allowed 100mb :x
People who have houses that actually look like RL houses impress and amaze me.
I’m a Leo/Cancer cusp with rising Gemini. It all makes sense now
The quote from this post.
From top left to right: Haurchefant Greystone, Nanamo Ul Namo, Wedge and Alpha, Alma bas Lexentale, Minfilia Warde, Alpa, Hildibrand Manderville, X’rhun Tia, Kan-E-Senna, Myste and Fray, Cirina Mol, Theomocent
I wanted to make a short video to showcase some things I’ve discovered recently, that’s probably not common knowledge, since sometimes I still see the ‘wall snap’ method being used on windows, and this utilizes stairs and balconies in addition to the fake partition.
You can place several things from storage onto the ‘dead zone’, giving the possibility to wall off balconies or add additions to it easily without having to first affix it to a partition, or use a third-party tool to go out of position. It’s a nice quality of life thing ^^
最優先事項:Top priority
What it feels like to play RDM in FFXIV.
@rainforest-cat
Roles on a Pirate Ship
[by Mark Cookman / Tribality 1, 2, 3] @we-are-pirate, @we-are-scarlet-corsair
Officer Roles on a Pirate Ship
If you are running a game with pirates in it, then you should know what the job entails. It’s not all boarding ships, counting booty, and drinking rum like you might think. A great deal of hard work is required to run a sailing ship with a law-abiding crew, let alone one populated by pirates. In this essay we are going to examine the five principle officers on board a pirate ship, their duties, and their responsibilities. This is part one of a three part lesson. In the next lesson we will examine the duties and responsibilities of other officers and crew members with special duties. In the final lesson, we will look at one very special group of crew members that are almost always overlooked. Read on to learn what pirates expected of their primary officers.
The principal officers of a pirate ship were the captain, the quartermaster, the pilot, the boatswain, and the master gunner. On some ships these positions were all elected by an equal vote of the crew and on others the captain picked the crew members he wanted to serve in the positions. The captain on a pirate vessel was almost always elected by an equal vote of the crew. On a privateer vessel this was not very often the case. Privateer captains were often the owners of the ship or were given commission by their monarch to take a vessel to sea. So it follows with the other officers. If the captain was elected, then generally all of the officers were elected. If the captain was appointed or held his position by means of ownership, then generally he picked the officers. In either case, an officer on a pirate ship served at the whim of the crew. Even a man picked by the captain would be booted down to a simple crewman if he could not do his job. For the most part though, a person elevated to serve as one of the principle officers did so for life. The title of this article refers to the fact that most often the authorities that captured, tried, and hung pirates concentrated on the five principle officers of the ship. These officers were generally the most intelligent and skilled crewmen on board the pirate vessel. They were people that everyone else on board the ship admired for their ability to do their job. Diligent action is the mother of respect on board a ship.
Captain
The captain, however he came to his position, was chosen for his leadership, bravery, and cunning. The captain was responsible for the ship and everything aboard her; every item and every man. He was responsible for the overall decisions affecting the ship and her crew. The captain decided where to sail and what to attack. He was the voice of his crew to all beyond the ship. He often led his crew in battle. In terms of daily duties, the captain kept a log of the voyage, managed the affairs of the ship through the officers, and generally served a four to six hour shift at the helm. The captain stayed in power by being successful. As long as there are prizes to plunder, rum to drink, and food to eat, the captain will not be voted out or mutinied against. It is when things get lean that the captain must worry about crew voting him unfit for command.
Quartermaster
The quartermaster (or first mate on a privateer vessel) was the number two man on the ship. He was responsible for enforcing the ship’s articles and administering punishment when necessary. The quartermaster was the trustee of the ship and her crew. He directly represented the crew to the captain. It was his responsibility to serve as a counterbalance to the captain in decisions that might be hazardous to the ship or the crew. A wise captain made no decisions that his first mate didn’t support. The quartermaster took responsibility for prize vessels and picked the treasure that the crew would take from a prize. He was also responsible for counting the booty and splitting the shares. Each day would find him working with his subordinate officers the boatswain, the master gunner, and the master at arms to effectively run the ship. The first mate also served a turn at the helm, generally a four to six hour shift.
Pilot
The pilot was the number three man on the ship and often the most educated. He served as the ship’s navigator and was generally the best all around sailor aboard the ship. He was responsible for plotting the ship’s course and maintaining that course. The pilot maintained all of the ship’s charts and maps as well as the tools of navigation. He was charged with keeping a daily log of every event relating to the sailing of the ship. He recorded the depth, the currents, the wind patterns, the ship’s location, the locations of reefs and sandbars, and the state of the rigging. He reported directly to the captain. The pilot oversaw the work of the sail-master and almost always had at least one assistant (a pilot’s mate) to help him with his duties. The pilot and his mate both served separate shifts at the helm in addition to taking readings from the moon and stars to plot and maintain the course.
Boatswain
The boatswain was the number four man on the ship and often the most feared by the crew. He was in charge of the provisions for the ship. He maintained the stores of food, water, rum, gunpowder, shot, sails, rope, wood, and tar required to keep the ship and crew fit for action. The boatswain also directed the loading of cargo into the hold to maintain the proper ballast to ensure level sailing. He was in charge of keeping the watches on the ship and maintaining discipline among the deck crew. He was responsible for the ship’s longboats and for picking a crew to man the sweeps when the longboats were used. The boatswain was charged with maintaining the ship’s seaworthy status. He oversaw the duties of both the carpenter and the cook. The boatswain generally had a mate to help him with his responsibilities. In general, his duties were to make certain that all the work of running the ship was done. He reported to the quartermaster. The Boatswain was often the most feared man on the ship because his obligations often made him uncompromising. It was his responsibility to keep everything “ship-shape”. Leniency was something the quartermaster might give to the crew, but it was not something the boatswain was in the position to give. Day and night, the boatswain would drive the crew to do whatever work was required. He maintained the watch log and reported any problems to the quartermaster.
Master Gunner
The master gunner was the number five man on the ship. He was responsible for the care and cleaning of all firearms, culverin (deck guns), and cannons on board the ship. He was also responsible for training the crew in the use of both firearms and ship’s weaponry. The master gunner picked and ran the gunnery crew. He reported to the quartermaster, but was responsible to the entire ship to make certain that the cannons hit the declared target. He was also responsible for maintaining the inventory of powder and shot for all of the guns on the ship. The master gunner was the only crew member besides the captain and the quartermaster entrusted to carry a key to the ship’s powder magazine. Additionally, the master gunner often led or picked hunting parties when they were called for. His day to day duties mainly consisted of drilling the gunnery crew and maintaining the guns.
The Next in Line to Hang – More Roles on a Pirate Ship
In this second part of a three part lesson dealing with the crew positions aboard a pirate vessel, we are going to look at the responsibilities of the Sail-master, the Carpenter, the Cook, the Surgeon, and the Master at Arms. These were all lower officer positions and were either voted upon or assigned by the captain as discussed in the first part of this lesson. The sailors who served in these positions were skilled laborers and, as such, their skills were always very much in demand on a ship. They were almost always offered a greater share of the treasure because of their skills. These were definitely crew members that a pirate ship could not function without.
Sail-master
The Sail-master was the most experienced crewman in the rigging and usually one of the best sailors on the ship. He was responsible for maintaining the sails and the rigging. The Sail-master knew every knot, line, rope, block and tackle in the rigging as well as how to repair them all. He was also responsible for training and running the sail crew as well as overseeing the making and patching of sails. The Sail-master took orders from and reported to the pilot.
Carpenter
The Carpenter was a skilled wood worker, often with some shipwright experience, who did all of the woodworking required by the crew. He was primarily responsible for repairing damage to the wooden portions of the ship and for plugging leaks that got too bad. (Ye should understand right now, before ye go to sea, that all ships leak, mates. It’s just when they really leak badly that you have to worry about it.) The Carpenter was also responsible for the construction of barrels and crates, as needed, to store cargo, as well as maintaining the tools of his trade. He took orders from and reported to the Boatswain.
Cook
The Cook was one of the most important of the lower officers. He was in charge of all matters relating to food on the ship. He made certain there was enough food, water, and rum on board for the planned cruise. He cooked the meals and suggested rationing when it was necessary. The Cook butchered the meat brought back by hunting parties and was the only man trusted to light a fire below decks. He maintained the necessary tools for both cooking and butchering. The Cook took orders from and reported to the Boatswain.
Surgeon
The Surgeon was likely one of the toughest men on the ship. He served as the barber/doctor/emergency surgeon for the entire crew. He was equally capable of shaving your beard and cutting off your damaged leg. The Surgeon dealt with not only the sick and the wounded, but also the dead. He, like the other lower officers, was responsible for maintaining the necessary tools of his trade. The Surgeon took his orders from and reported to the Quartermaster. It was rare for a ship to have a real doctor and it was common for the carpenter or the cook to fill this role as needed.
Master at Arms
The Master at Arms was often the most skilled warrior on the crew. He was responsible for training the crew in hand to hand combat. He also led the ship’s boarding parties and hunting parties when they were necessary. The Master at Arms position was not a separate position on every vessel and often these responsibilities fell to the Quartermaster. When the Master at Arms position was filled on a ship, he took orders from and reported to the Quartermaster.
These 5 core positions represent the Non-Commissioned Officers of a pirate or privateer ship. These men all commanded other men on work details and so their words carried great sway with the crew. It was often from among these men that the next captain was chosen when a captain lost his position through a vote of no confidence. Thus, these were the men that the captain had to keep loyal to him to stay in command of the ship.
And Hang the Musikers, Too – Even More Roles on a Pirate Ship
In this article, we will be looking at the makeup of the crew itself. Remember that the only rule with pirates is that there are no rules; no two crews of any two pirate ships were exactly the same. Even so, we can narrow down some roles common to pirate/privateer crews based upon the jobs that must be done aboard ship. Most simply put, pirate crews are a mixture of brutes, gunners, swabbies, and musikers. Let’s examine each category in turn.
Brutes
A great deal of hard work and heavy hauling is involved in just sailing a tall-masted ship. In strong winds the canvas sails must be man-handled by a deck crew that is stronger. Loading and unloading supplies, most especially cannons or chests of gold, requires a number of strong backs. This is why every ship has its share of brutes – big, strong men capable of handling themselves no matter the work or the fight. In addition to the tasks already mentioned, brutes would be key men in hunting parties, ship boarding, and raiding groups as well. Keep in mind that not all brutes need to be hulking bruisers. A wiry-tough and dexterous hunter, skilled with both blades and long rifle, could be a brute as well. Brutes, no matter their size, do not shrink from a hard task. Men of this sort make up perhaps as much as ½ of a pirate crew, but they will be mixed among the gunners and swabbies, not a stand alone corp. Most of the men on a pirate or privateer ship were probably gunners.
Gunners
Depending upon the size of their shot, each cannon required a crew of either 3 or 4 men to load and fire it. So a sloop carrying 4 small guns per side would require a minimum of 24 men to fully maintain them and that does not include the officers directing the cannon fire. On a large ship, like Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, a full gun crew would be 160 men dedicated only to firing the cannons. (It is important to note here that Blackbeard had a total crew compliment of 125 on board the Queen Anne’s Revenge.) These crewmen would have to be available 24/7 to do their job whenever required, but otherwise might have no duties on the ship. There was double-duty in most crews though. Most pirate ships didn’t keep a full compliment of gunners like warships of the time did because fewer crew members meant fewer shares and that meant more money for everyone when the treasure was split. Gunners could make up between 1/3 to 2/3 of a crew.
Swabbies
Swabbies, or actual trained sailors, are the crew members responsible for handling the rigging and the sails to keep the ship moving. These are the guys and gals who climb the ratlines into the rigging and walk the spars that jut from the masts. Swabbies sometimes fight from the highest position that they can get to on their own ship and then leap into the rigging of the enemy vessel when boarding. Often dexterous fighters, swabbies are known for leaping into the fray, but sometimes they hide in the rigging as deadly snipers. It might be surprising to discover that skilled sailors usually comprised less than 1/3 of the total crew compliment of the ship.
Musikers
It is difficult to prove that “musikers”, or musicians as we call them, were ever a stand-alone part of a pirate crew. However, two excellent examples from the pirate period demonstrate that they have been a common part of most ships of war, pirate and privateer ships included. The first example is from the early Seventeenth century. In Captain John Smith’s advice concerning how to conduct a one-on-one naval engagement he remarks when preparing to board one should, “… sound Drums and Trumpets, and Saint George for England.” The second example comes from the early Eighteenth century. In the articles of Captain Bartholomew Roberts it is stated: “The Musikers to have Rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six Days and Nights, none without special Favour.” When thinking about the musicians on board a ship in the 16th to 18th centuries, one must not think of a band. That would be far too organized a concept. There is no way to know how many crew members may have been musicians, but one assumes that the number is not large.
It is likely that ships of this period had crew members who owned musical instruments as varied as brass horns, mouth harps, fiddles, bag pipes and accordions. Furthermore, sailors could gather numerous instruments from the various ports of call their ship made. Examples here are numerous: cowhide and goatskin drums from Africa, dried gourd maracas from Cuba, bamboo drums and flutes from Hispaniola, and even tambourines from Morocco. Pause a moment and consider the combined sounds of all of the instruments mentioned here. Now you know why a band is not the idea you want to have. The musicians were popular with the crew, as they were entertainment as well as a valuable battle element. The musicians played during meal times and during work breaks allowing the crew some entertainment to break the monotony of long hours of tiring work. This boost in moral was welcome at anytime, but was perhaps the most effective when used in battle.
From stories of Bartholomew Roberts crew and others, we know that when a ship with musicians approached another ship with the intention to fight, the effects of the music could be terrifying to the enemy. The musicians would play marches and other martial music. There were drum rolls, trumpet and bugle calls, and perhaps even a piper given the nationality of the crew. Add to this the noise of the ship’s cook beating upon his pots and pans and the crew stamping their feet or beating their weapons against the ship. Finally top this off with the sounds of shouting, screaming, and shooting, both pistols and rifles as well as cannons and deck guns. Your imagination can supply you with the details of the scene. The intended result is achieved: the morale aboard the pirate vessel is raised to a fevered pitch while the morale of their intended prize is shaken. So do not forget that pirates and privateers know the value of bardic inspiration when you run those encounters.
living in a super herd
Oh my goodness. The tears. Too funny.