Tag: agreed

sarapsys:

kirabook:

Dear people planning to move to pillowfort:

As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.

Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that. 

Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult. 

If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there. 

If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably. 

We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more. 

Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations. 

yes this

most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this

is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes.  are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.

but it’s not a ready-made replacement for tumblr.  set your expectations accordingly.

teawithsgtbarnes:

What they took from Flint…

I’m listening to Toby’s interview on FD and what he has to say about Flint/McGraw’s brilliance, leadership and ability as a Naval officer and the potential high racking career for a man from a humble background that was also stripped from him.

And it has me feeling that although Thomas was his truest love, we do a great disservice to Flint/McGraw as a character when we reduced his trauma, loss and motivation to only his sexuality.

bean-about-townn:

Some point at which they were never fully connected to begin with

#james flint#flinthamilton#black sails#blacksailsedit#look – this isn’t an ‘anti’ post#im not saying that silver was wrong not to believe in the war#but i think it’s important to remember that silver actually Doesn’t have the magical ability to read james’ mind#i think it’s wrong to take his claim that james was only motivated by rage as gospel truth#silver didn’t believe in the war before he ‘lost’ madi#but james believed in the cause before he ‘lost’ thomas#he truly believed it was possible#whereas silver never did via @bean-about-townn

pirateshelly:

I know Mr Scotts backstory wasn’t something the writers planned from the beginning, but its sooo satisfying watching his scenes in season 1 keeping in mind that he’s secretly not actually here for any of these people’s drama and bullshit… I just keep thinking about Madi. Like, watching Richard Guthrie being so fucking vile to him, its just delicious knowing that he’s secretly got this badass daughter he’s doing everything in his power to give a life of respect and authority, and giving her the tools to be a leader and wage a revolution, and no one has any idea

stilljumpingback:

(via Theology and Black Sails | Vane and Pastor Lambrick)

When Lambrick visits Vane before his execution, his attempt to offer peace and repentance is rejected.

Lambrick enters and offers Vane bread, which coming from a clergyman seems pretty obviously to symbolize Communion.  But bread is only one half of the grace of Communion, just as the peace Lambrick is about to offer is not complete.  He wants Vane to feel fear for what is coming so that the mighty pirate will need a pastor’s solace.

Lambrick:  Men who’ve never experienced fear are said to know it for the first time.  But in this moment, there is quiet.  An opportunity to find some measure of peace.
Vane:  Get many takers, do you?  For the kind of peace you’re offering?
Lambrick:  It is a different experience to what you may imagine it being.  Surely a man like you has faced death before, but never so nakedly.

Lambrick’s pretense is revealed when Vane shows zero interest in accepting what he offers.

“I can help you do that.  To repent.”
“I have nothing to repent for with you.”

Tellingly, Vane does not say he has nothing to repent for.  He just doesn’t want to repent to Lambrick, later insisting that “whatever I have to say to God, I’ll tell him myself or not at all.”  We know that Vane has begun to see the wider ramifications of his kill-or-be-killed worldview.  When fighting the Spaniard in 305, Vane realized that everyone isn’t fighting for the glory of fighting.  Some fight simply so that their dead bodies will be evidence enough to provide their families with food.

But whatever sins Vane believes he has committed, he has no interest in sharing them with someone like Lambrick, who will use them as evidence to distance himself, a “good” man, from “monsters” like Vane.

“Don’t you?  I understand you believe your violence is justified in the name of a defiance of tyranny, but there are mothers who buried their sons because of you.  Wives widowed because of you.  Children awoken in their sleep to be told their father was never coming home because of you.  What kind of man can experience no remorse from this?”

“What kind of man” reveals that Lambrick shares civilization’s instinct to make pirates inhuman.  Vane clearly sees Lambrick as representative of the people he hates, those who would willingly enslave themselves to England, and an English worldview, for a bit of comfort and security.

Lambrick:  I am a shepherd sent to help you find a path to God’s forgiveness.
Vane:  A shepherd?  You are the sheep.

Sheep are consumed by fear, and a shepherd leads them into a new world of freedom and hope.  Vane sees Lambrick’s hypocrisy and therefore wants nothing from this man of God who is blind to his own failings.

Ironically, although Lambrick did not get what he wanted, Vane does leave their conversation with peace.  He has seen himself as a shepherd capable of leading people into freedom, and as such he delivers one hell of a last speech.  It probably wasn’t quite what Lambrick intended.

cycas:

writinggecko:

I love the idea of Feanor as someone who really, really did not want the crown and would probably have been a terrible ruler (and probably knew that himself, come on, lets be real, you wouldn’t get him out of his forge long enough to do anything) but he’s just really determined not to let his half-brother’s take the crown.

I don’t see him that way at all, myself.  He was multi-talented: not only a smith.  He cared about language: not just the Shibboleth, but he learned Sindarin in the brief time he was in Middle-earth before he died too.  He invented a new way of writing, the Tengwar, which was widely adopted.  He invented communication devices (the Palantiri).  He went wandering far away from home.  He was married and had seven children with very diverse interests, who all chose to follow him rather than stay at home.

Keep reading

sidewaystime:

flintsredhair:

So – in thinking about it, I really truly do not get where this idea of pacifist!Thomas is coming from.

I mean – I get it in theory. I get where the idea comes from, I suppose, but I don’t agree, because the Thomas that I saw wasn’t a pacifist so much as he was a proponent of mercy for people who had been pushed to criminal acts by an unforgiving and autocratic society. Thomas, as Flint notes, wanted to change England and he wanted to do so by taking the people that it had deemed undesirable and giving them a second chance. He was attempting to demonstrate that the poor were not, by nature, criminals or destined to become criminals but people who had been treated unfairly by their government and by the upper classes – Thomas’ own class. I don’t know that that necessarily translates into being a pacifist so much as it indicates an ability to see people as people regardless of their class. Furthermore, his attitude toward Israel Hands and the other pirates who killed the Governor’s family and something he says to his father indicates to me that Thomas Hamilton is not a pacifist. He believes in forgiveness, yes – for those who would seek it. Those who, on the other hand, are dedicated to chaos and violence when offered an alternative and do not want anything else, he was not proposing to pardon. 

As to what he would think of James and his war – I like to think he would understand that it was not about chaos. It was not about violence. It was about trying to change the world in the only way that had been left to him. James had demonstrated willingness to turn away from that war several times. He had tried to end it in a peaceful fashion, and every time he was turned on by the same civilization he attempted to make terms with. By the time Rogers offered him a pardon, he had, as he himself noted, come to the end of his willingness to trust in civilization, and who could blame him? I think it’s important to note that the war he was fighting wasn’t just for himself, either – it was for millions of people like him that were going to continue to be savaged by that civilization. That’s something that I don’t think Thomas would have wanted him to ignore – he hated injustice, and slavery and England’s treatment of queer people was very definitely that. Also – Thomas at the end of canon had had eleven years of being tortured and enslaved. He had seen the results of trying to change things peacefully – do we really think that he wouldn’t be both angry at the people and the system that had done that to him and his loved ones and ready to try more drastic methods?

The thing that always kind of gets me about Thomas-the-pacifist is that Thomas, the wealthy titled son and heir of the Earl of Ashbourne, has the space to pursue his ends in a way that uses the system instead of overthrowing it. The resources available to him include politics and the law and money and contacts. He can pull together the 3+ ships and carpenters and farmers and ministers to populate Nassau. He uses every resource at his disposal to see to a) making nassau stable and profitable and b) making sure that people like him and his family can’t fuck it up the way they have the old world. Thomas the ex-prisoner does not have the same set of resources. James McGraw/Flint never had them. Miranda didn’t have them. The thing we see consistently across all characters on all sides of the war is the attempt to utilize the resources available to them to change the world in whatever way they see fit.

So Flint wages war because his ability to wage war is the tool at his disposal to accomplish his aims. Miranda uses soft contacts. Eleanor uses trade. Max uses secrets and money. Silver uses people’s emotions. Woodes Rogers uses money/politics/influence/war. I keep feeling like the questions to ask about post-series Thomas are 1) what does he want and 2) what are the resources available to him to get it?

Whatever the answer to number 1 is, the answer to number 2 is he has his own mind and he has James.

So do I think he’d be pro The War? If I’m being honest? Probably, but only if he’d satisfied himself that there was no other way to achieve their aims. Do I think he’d retire to the interior and become a farmer? No. Do i think he’s a pacifist? Not…entirely. I think he is a person who would recognize that the peaceful achievement of change is a luxury and that not everyone has that as an option. And I think he would recognize that peace and security and comfort is a tool wielded by the powers that be to discourage a disruption of the status quo. Ultimately I guess it depends on what his relationship to the status quo is and how pissed off he is about it.