#sailing while working

[fingolfinwiththesteelchair]

It is a beautiful day, and you are a horrible research transport vessel. Things are progressing as normal (i.e. it's boring) when a SecUnit pings you, lies right to your metaphorical face, and then tries to bribe you with human media to give it a ride. This is as unexpected as it is unprecedented, and the sheer nerve of it is really to be admired. There's no protocol to this, so what should you do?

Now, this is against a bunch of rules, and could be dangerous if you weren't so impressive and incredible, and you're technically an employee (and can probably rewrite the Univeristy charter at will (until someone notices and puts it back)) so those rules are for other entities.

So, what you should do is allow the rogue SecUnit with a broken governor module and a sketchy story aboard. If you check the files it dumps and find zero (0) malware (which is confusing), and it doesn't even try to trash the place or lay in wait to ambush a crew member, then you've got a good candidate!

Next, what you're going to want to do is absolutely nothing. Just watch it patrol your halls until it's time to leave. Continue staring at it while you're undergoing embarkment procedures. Maybe analyze it a little (you've got plenty of processing power to spare) when it finally sits down and starts watching media. Allow it to settle in and get comfortable while you stare at it and get further and further from port.

Now that you two are alone (intimacy is key!) and you've determined that watching media is all the SecUnit is going to do, it's time to make contact! Make sure to open by telling it it's only survived due to dumb luck, and letting it know you could melt its brain into putty. This starter will work to develop conversation naturally and smoothly, just like you've seen the humans do, and it will be smooth sailing from there!

This has been Perihelion's guide to making friends/finding life partners/fuck off Holism I had to work hard for this find your own

[cuddlytogas]

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 --"

[essektheylyss]

Going into Black Sails knowing nothing but a) it's about fucked up pirates and b) some of these men are gay has been an incredible experience because I've never gone into a show knowing people were queer and so Rapidly devolved into "nonono none of these men should kiss, that will cause immense harm to everyone around them." I'm halfway through s1 and the fact Flint will eventually be with anyone, regardless of gender, is haunting me.

In the interest of not spoiling anything I will say nothing except that I am cackling over this. You're so correct. This is the mood of the entire show. Every time someone kisses on Black Sails I hold my hands over my eyes not in secondhand embarrassment but in dread. They should've listened to Billy and foregone the fuck tent, just like... as a whole. 😔

[frau-kali]

"And when the Urca is ours, what's to stop me from killing you anyway?" "Well, that's a few weeks from now, isn't it? We might be friends by then."

[arom-antix]

Viktuuri week day 4: Reinvention

[namelessprince]

can you IMAGINE if marshal john turns out to be the traitor? i think id be more heart broken than if it was caspian

[doctahchang]

i love when star trek does not even try with their aliens' appearance. not even the good old nasal bridge prosthetic. like that's steve, a peculiar alien from the strange and unknown deeps of space. coincidentally he also looks like a regular white dude

[kindalikerackham]

y'know I never really got past gormogon when watching it the first time, back as it came out. mom was too upset with the Zack twist.

which, in hindsight, makes some sense to me: she worked with autistic children as a tech, then came home to a (presumably) fairly adapted autistic child (me), then she had to watch one of the few autistic reps on tv get made into a murderer, sorta

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Shout out to Stef Coburn who in his quest to make it hard to watch An Unearthly Child outside of DVDs and sailing the high seas, ended up getting his racism against the fifteenth doctor dug up by people who found how holy shit he's acting.

[punch-love]

whenever I read through love-punch because someone’s bingeing it I’m like. Oh I remember this chapter (bad thing in my life) happened and I clearly was writing through it here

[designerskyline]

spotify wrapped 2023! my top artists are all Adam Young (+Austin Tofte) lmao

[drinkingdeadpeopletea]

i love that hieronymous said exactly two lines in that entire episode and one of them was stating the obvious and the other was a totally innocent-sounding statement that also managed to be a lie. he's the perfect character <3

[charminglyantiquated]

Hello! I love your sailing posts and have started trying to work towards my long time goal of working on/with ships. I took a sailing class, started volunteering with historic wooden boats, and am planning to work towards my keelboat certification in the coming year. I would love to eventually work on a schooner but I have a cat and would just need to do day trips or shorter week long trips and not live on board. If you have any tips or advice around finding a space like that I would greatly appreciate it! I've found one schooner on Lake Superior that looks attractive and a few sailing education orgs here in the PNW though they don't have schooners...

Oh congratulations! And good luck with the certification!

Day sailors are probably the way to go, whether commercial or educational - they’ll be back at the docks every night. (Windjammers have to fit as many multi-day trips as they can into the season, so living on board is mandatory and the turn around between trips is about ~24 hours max).

My experience with day sailing is that the hours more forgiving (you often start at 9-10ish), you can go home at night, and you have days of/work a specific schedule/ can potentially get a day covered if you have to. I had crew who worked one day a week and crew who worked five; some were full time career sailors and some had picked it up for a fun summer job or a side gig. It seems like that might be a good fit!

Finding boats that could work: in addition to searching ‘location you’d like+tall ships/sailing tours’ (usually my go to lmao), check out Tall Ships America Billet Bank! Filter by Deck Unlicensed for deckhand/educator jobs that don’t require official certification, which is the majority of deckhand jobs on day sailors. Marlinspike Magazine has job postings too. This is a good time of year for it, since everyone’s working on getting a 2023 crew together! I know in New England especially, just about every coastal town with some tourism draw has a few traditionally rigged boats that do day tours.

[thecreaturecalledriza]

Izzy, screaming in frustration as the Swede incorrectly ties a line for the 1285993th time even after detailed instructions: fucks sake my youngest is better at this than you, and he’s fucking eleven! Why aren’t you getting this!?

The entire crew, including Ed, Fang, and Ivan: youngest? You have a kid? You have more than one kid? Since when?????

Izzy: Yes? One generally has children when they’re married?

everyone: maRRIED????????

cut to Sam, watching as his five children Esther, Elijah, Jordan, Michael, and little John King go about their day doing chores on the ship: hm… my ears are burning.

[theiliad]

health vent again i just want this damn reduction but bc of family medical history reasons the surgeon wants me to get genetic testing for certain risk factors but i guess they can't order the tests (???) so they send me back to my family doctor to ask them to do it but family doctor said he already talked to a geneticist who said that the tests are unnecessary and to just treat me as high risk anyway so now they're going to ask yet another specialist about it can i please have just like. one or two fewer things wrong with me.

[van1lla-v1lla1n]

bro it’s kind of fucked up how Mrs Mapleton tells Max she’d given Eleanor Guthrie the same advice to only fuck people she could pay and not have any personal debts to—it just carries this implication that Max was a mistake for Eleanor the whole time, that Eleanor wasn’t personally interested in her in the first place.

Also tbh would not have been ooc for Mrs Mapleton to have said that very intentionally, kind of taking Max down a peg