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Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.

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Hubble Telescope image vs. James Webb Telescope

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Izzy gets muppetified against his will.

Rediscovered a sketch from my sketchbook and spent WAY too much time in clip studio to make this.

I’m still not normal about this show.

#ofmd #Our Flag Means Death #blackbonnet #izzy hands #lucius spriggs #when I say I CACKLED

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As a biochem student and certified nerd, I feel the responsibility to bestow this knowledge upon as many people as I possibly can:

You do NOT need to "earn" meals through exercise.

You know why?

Because exercise only accounts for about 20% of your calories. The majority of the calories your body burns, it uses to keep itself alive. It uses them to power your brain and metabolism. In fact, your brain ALONE is responsible for spending about 20% of your calories.

Your BRAIN, just to keep itself going, uses up just as many (or even more!!!) calories than all the exercise you do.

Your RESTING metabolic rate is responsible for burning between 60 and 75% of your calories.

You don't just deserve food because you're working out. YOU DESERVE FOOD BECAUSE YOUR BODY NEEDS IT TO STAY ALIVE.

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As someone who lives alone currently and talks more than ever before, I can vouch for my weirdness

people are the most interesting thing in the world im obsessed w everyones weird habits and funny stories. the average person is so fucked up that its funny. like no one on earth is normal n u should make it ur job to see why

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When your clone comes by and asks, "Nuncle, why on earth are you wearing a Boba and Mando sock?"

And your best excuse to continue hiding your fanfiction habit is, "I need to do laundry"

But thanks to her, I now have added Boba Feet and Mando-Laundryan to my vocabulary lol

#bobadin #my socks are awesome #I'm too old to be this big of a child #I'm going to be 42 and I'm actually a 4 year old

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Look nice, but probably wear kevlar underneath if you can. I trust no one these days...

ppl who get critical of like… white middle class extinction rebellion protestors and like… jane fonda, because “they can afford to get arrested” like… that is the point? the point is to use your privilege to put yourself in the way of things. if you are white and middle class in the u.s. and the u.k. you can occupy waterloo bridge, or city hall, or the capitol steps, and you can refuse to move when a cop tells you to, and the worst thing that will happen to you is a fine you can afford to pay. (you might also sustain some injuries, to be fair we must acknowledge that that is not negligible.) the point is you cause disruption by putting your privileged body in the way, where you create disruption that forces attention to be drawn to what you are saying, and you do this because you can afford to. if you are jane fonda you also wear a jaunty hat and smile smugly because you are the safest person on earth, and also it makes the cops look real dumb. it’s the point!

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Some facts:

1) Black Americans created jazz. 2) Jewish Americans created comic books. 3) These things are said to be the only original American art forms.

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Anita Hill deserved to be listened to and Joe FUCKING Biden did not allow others to testify.

This whole mess.... Our entire goddamn government is fucked.

Our country is fucked up because of the same motherfuckers being in power too fucking long

🤬

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I'm fucking crying. This whole month has been a goddamn nightmare.

Keep fighting. I'm not going to give up. I'm not going back in the closet to make bigots comfortable.

My friends deserve to stay married.

My niece deserves to live free and love who she wants.

My trans students deserve to live their lives in their truth.

This world does not get to be defined by those who hate.

I was so happy this year seeing so many of my students being open about who they are.

I will not let this world destroy their joy.

Fuck hate.

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Friendly reminder that this blog is pro-choice and if you don’t think everyone should have full control of their own body, then kindly unfollow me right now and go to hell

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Stede & Ed, Old Money & New Money

This is potentially an unpopular opinion (?), but I will say there is a slight nuance to the class discussion in Our Flag Means Death specifically around Ed and Stede and where they meet in the middle as far as class and wealth. It is not rich vs. poor, or at least not just that. Rather, it’s the trope of New Money vs. Old Money.

(I know Tumblr cuts these long posts automatically these days but this got rather too long for me to take the chance.)

Keep reading

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I mean.... yeah.

Damn. This show is good.

Stede & Ed, Old Money & New Money

This is potentially an unpopular opinion (?), but I will say there is a slight nuance to the class discussion in Our Flag Means Death specifically around Ed and Stede and where they meet in the middle as far as class and wealth. It is not rich vs. poor, or at least not just that. Rather, it's the trope of New Money vs. Old Money.

(I know Tumblr cuts these long posts automatically these days but this got rather too long for me to take the chance.)

(By the way, race is an element of this discussion too, absolutely, I just don't feel I'm the right person to talk about it and it deserves its own deep and nuanced discussion independent of this narrow one around class and wealth I want to ruminate on here.)

The fact is, Ed is rich when we meet him in the show and he behaves like someone who is "New Money" rich. As much as Ed had a poor upbringing, he doesn't currently, on-screen relate much to other poor or working-class characters of the Revenge. Ed's not stuck-up about it, to be sure, but neither is Stede (for the most part). But the people Ed relates to directly are not members of the crew. His familiarity is really limited to his First Mate Izzy (and I personally think even that is a stretch and that he treats Izzy as a trusted employee but not a friend) and Stede, as a fellow ship's captain. Ed's friendly and even familiar with other crew members, like Frenchie in the fancy party episode, but they never connect on a personal or intimate level beyond the level that Ed is friendly with everyone. The other person Ed relates to as an equal is Calico Jack, who also introduces himself as a ship's captain, if a temporarily embarrassed one having recently been mutinied upon.

Much of the narrative tension Ed feels around the upper class when it comes to wealth and prestige is based on the fact that he has, "more riches than you can shake a stick at," but he doesn't know how to use them. This is the classic New Money vs Old Money trope. Ed wants Stede to teach him to, "live the high life," because he doesn't know how, since Ed achieved his position through skill and necessity, which precluded the "elegance" of Old Money.

Ed is in awe of Stede packing the hold with marmalade for his personal comfort and how he privileges that over his own survival, not as a foolish act (though it is) but as a rather supremely elegant one, bordering on arrogance, where having the superlative marmalade for one's enjoyment at breakfast is deemed as more important than grubby concerns like having extra stores of gunpowder for a potential battle for one's own survival. Ed might know intellectually that for Stede it really is a foolish oversight, but he can't help but be impressed by how it plays to the brand of the "Gentleman Pirate" who is so far above such concerns that he can prefer the elegance of a gentleman's lifestyle over the necessities of pirate life. That's part of what makes Stede fascinating to Ed.

The New Money vs Old Money trope is a fairly well-trodden one, going back thousands of years (Marius vs Sulla of the Roman Republic are one of my personal historical favorites). The trope, for those unfamiliar, is that Old Money doesn't respect New Money, but while New Money has more power and vivaciousness at its disposal it feels keenly the gatekeeping of Old Money, even if that Old Money is tired and in some cases almost spent. New Money desperately seeks the respect of Old Money, who will never give it, while Old Money jealously desires the fresh wealth of New Money and needs its vivaciousness to survive. Old Money, therefore, uses the byzantine restrictions of its wealthy lifestyle to lock New Money out of its inner circle, isolating and mocking New Money for not understanding things like which silverware to use and other silly rules that take a lifetime to learn.

What makes Stede interesting in OFMD and prevents the tired cliche of this meeting of Old vs New from playing out the same way as it does everywhere else is that Stede is giving up his privileged Old Money position to meet Ed in the middle. More importantly, Stede lacks the class arrogance of Old Money and respects pirates like Ed far more than he cares about the refinement of other people's upbringing or lack thereof. As far as we can tell within the story, Stede is fairly class-blind and as noted, seems to see the refinements of a gentleman to be a lifestyle choice one can be worthy of simply by having a sincere wish to do so, rather than something that is based on birth. (This is a huge part of why Ed finds him so fascinating and attractive by the way, in my opinion.)

Now, Stede is privileged enough that his "abandoning" of his Old Money fortune still puts him ahead of the pack, he can "start" with a well-appointed ship (though only a single one and not one that's competitive against a British naval vessel) and pay his crew a salary. But what makes Stede in some ways redeemable is that he does not trade on the overwhelming wealth of his Old Money to give himself a fleet or frame himself as better than other pirate captains (beyond dressing better, which goes back to Stede seeing being a gentleman as a lifestyle choice open to anyone rather than a birth privilege). Rather, Stede's reducing his personal wealth down to "upper middle class" or perhaps "lower upper class" to be the pirate captain of a single vessel because it's what he passionately wants to do. He cares about being a pirate captain more than being extremely wealthy and comfortable.

(Interestingly, in S2, we're going to see Stede without any wealth or property, even the Revenge, truly forced to rely on his own wits to survive and that promises to be a very interesting story.)

To go back to Ed, while he is a man of many uncertainties with a great deal of self-consciousness around his upbringing that still plays directly into the New Money trope. Ed these days is not poor or of a lower wealth class. He's also not insecure about his ability to rebuild his wealth again should he lose it. These days, he has supreme confidence in his ability to succeed in any industry he sets his mind to.

Rather, Ed's bashing his head against the glass ceiling of the next level of success. He wants to be respected and comfortable by those who are also wealthy and he wants to be welcomed among them. He craved the acceptance of the fancy nobles at the party and didn't want to hear from Stede that they're awful and not worth his time. It was shattering for him to be so roundly rejected by the French aristocrats. The New vs Old Money trope becomes a romance rather than a competition based on the fact that both Ed and Stede are meeting in the middle and the lesson conveyed from that encounter isn't that Ed as New Money will never be accepted by the Old Money elite, but rather that he doesn't need to be because the best part of that group, Stede, wants to meet him in the middle and there they get to be themselves and create a world that makes them both happy, away from society at large with all its restrictions and prejudices.

I think the point I'm trying to get to is part of a larger one I've been ruminating on around Ed's well-earned pride, that so often goes unremarked upon or unacknowledged. Ed deserves to be proud. He clawed his way to the top of a difficult and brutal field to become the most famed and feared pirate on the sea. His meeting with Stede is a meeting of two people who have reached the top of what society says we should want: to have a successful career or to have a spouse and children, and both have reached that goal and found themselves to still be unhappy. They meet in the middle in forging a new path. But Ed still deserves, for better or worse depending on the views of the audience, to be acknowledged for what he is on the page in the story: a wealthy man, albeit one who came up through a criminal enterprise (not to say that Old Money didn't!) who sees in Stede the final step that has been denied him, the final privileges of the life he has earned: luxury and the respect of his financial peers.

Clearly part of what drew his fascination to the idea of Stede, the Gentleman Pirate, is that someone would be born into the life he wants and then choose the life he has. He was immediately fascinated, perhaps seeing Stede as a means to an end only, perhaps in love with him a little from the first time he heard of him (as I believe) but definitely one way or the other set on an idea that he couldn't explain to Izzy (who wouldn't understand): that Ed hoped by interacting with this Old Money Gentleman Pirate to achieve by education or by violence that final step of respect and luxury that is so often denied to New Money, according to the age-old trope that is also often the reality.

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gonna just dip my toe into some fairly toxic discourse

to say that when people hold up asexuals like me as a reason to ban any expression of kink from pride parades and the like, i am reminded of an experience i had in kindergarten, where a fellow five-year-old completely misunderstood how my dairy allergies worked and thought he could make me pass out by waving a piece of cheese at me.

like, okay, i don't experience sexual attraction to anybody; that doesn't mean i'm gonna melt like the wicked witch of the west if i see someone else wearing bondage gear. i'm a grown adult and frankly, straight allo culture throws more explicit portrayals of sexuality at me every day. trust me, i can handle it. don't project your puritan ideals onto me.

for the record, speaking only for this asexual, the actual things that make me uncomfortable at pride are cops, crowds, and (as someone very susceptible to burning and heat exhaustion) the sun. one of those things should be banned while the other two are basically inevitable. kink doesn't even begin to factor into it.

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This reminds me of a sign I saw when going to ther world's biggest ball of twine. It was just a very simple hand written sign that said, "I have a ball of twine too"

I kinda wanted to see what they had going on lol

Off-Brand World Landmarks

Great Pyramids, but they’re the Bass Pro Shop in Tennessee

Eiffel Tower, but it’s the cowboy version in Paris Texas

London’s Tower Bridge, but it’s the replica in Suzhou China (it has twice as many towers lol)

The Statue of Liberty, but she’s in Spain and one-uping by holding TWO torches, damn

The Taj Mahal but it’s in Bangladesh and it’s pink and like, I’m sorry, but like, really cute

The Great Sphinx, but it’s in China and also Iron Man is there

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I read this and BAWLED LIKE A BABY

I literally spent the weekend being gay and open about it and feeling so good with my friends and partners and just....

Fuck, I hate that anyone EVER had to hide themselves

I had to do it and it's terrible knowing there's others who are still forced to pretend

No one should have to pretend 😥

*cough gay cough*

#happy pride month #lgbtqia #remembering this part is hard #hiding is not fair #the closet is bullshit