#i dont know how actual piracy works please dont be mad

[honeydewmelan]

thinking about spies pirate au and

curt as the captain of their ship, owen is his first mate, but sometimes it feels like he really has control. doesnt help that curt is terrible at hiding a respect and admiration that slowly turns into genuine care for his crewmate. one day curt makes a mistake. a temporary lapse in judgement, bad luck, whatever you want to call it. the result is the same, the ship they had been planning to raid was more heavily manned - and more importantly, more heavily armed - than they expected. curt yells to cut the lines that grapple them to the other ship, and owen, who usually jumps the gap with confidence and skill, who has made that jump hundreds of times, slips on a wet rail and falls into the sea. maybe its that curt doesnt notice, maybe its that hes acting in the interest of the rest of the ship, owen will never know. hes pulled aboard by the enemy ship, who intend to question and then kill him, but he manages to secure a spot as as crewmate with his sharp wit and quick aim, working his way up until he is once again first mate, but this time on the ship known as the Chimera.

from there it plays out similarly to the musical but theyre pirates now

au originally by @kairithemang0 !

[lilysaus]

time for lilys rare, once-every-five-months hot take on current general opinions, and this one has to do with j k rowling and harry potter.

ive seen some really harsh things said about her, and ive done my own research, and you know what? youre all right. shes a horrible, awful, nasty excuse for a human being. she is. im not going to deny it and i never will. you wanna know something else? harry potter, despite some of the horrible things that j k rowling included within it, is still a great work of fiction.

there. ive said it. harry potter is a great work of fiction. now, that might just be my ignorant little two-year-old brain who grew up reading that series saying that, it might be that im just desperately clinging to my precious past that means so much to me, but still.

consider this: a person can be a terrible, awful person that no one likes and still create fairly good things. someone, such as j k rowling, can be awful and horrible and completely unlikeable and still be a fairly good author.

i mean, just look at the things that the harry potter fandom has created. the darker, more j-k-rowling-esque things included in the series havent stopped the fandom from finding things within the books to justify their silly little headcanons. there are so many things about the harry potter series that are actually so cool and amazing that i dont think we should just completely ignore it.

instead of never reading harry potter again, just dont buy new books. if youve never read it but really want to, borrow the books from someone. find some free pdf online. find them somewhere where you wont have to pay for j k rowlings sexist, racist, and homophobic agenda.

instead of buying the movies, go hang out with someone who already has them. ask your friends if they already have the harry potter movies and either borrow them or watch the movies together. go onto piracy websites, for crying out loud! thats right! im condoning piracy for this one! go watch them illegally! as long as you arent paying for it, i dont care!

and another thing! keep creating fan content for it! and not just any fan content! make the kind of content that will make j k rowling see red. make the kind of stuff thatll just grind her gears. make the kind of stuff thatll make her scream in anger at her phone when she sees it. fanfics, fanart, if you think of it, you should make it.

please, dont let the creator of the content decide who enjoys the content and how. just dont support the creator while you enjoy the content. do the kind of stuff thatll make her mad, but she cant do jack-shit about it. just dont bash on the content.

you shouldnt feel guilty for liking harry potter just because the author is a little shit. you shouldnt feel guilty for liking something you grew up on. because again, you dont have to like the author to like the book. you dont have to like the director to like the movie. you dont have to like the creator to like the content.

thank you for coming to my hot take. have a wonderful rest of your day.

[lollybliz]

Once again not getting specific but like. I've never understood the whole '~company~ is problematic, we must hold them accountable, stop using their products immediately' thing. Like. Ok so let say you do, somehow, manage to get enough people to permanently boycott ~company~ to effect their bottom line. It's never going to happen. But let's say it did.

Who are you hurting. Is it the ceo, who makes all these decisions you're so mad about? No, not them; they're a salary person and will likely not see anything other than a raise in the entire time they're working. A change in the profit margin won't effect them. They won't let it. They like their income, and they couldn't care less about the people they 'serve'. Ok. So if it isn't going to affect the ceo who makes all the decisions you find so repugnant, maybe it's the donors and shareholders, the stock market pundits that encourage the decisions you hate because they might help marketability or reach or what have you. They're the ones going, "yes, I know if we put an openly queer character in we'd make a few people here happy, but don't you want to market to China as well? There's a looooot of money to be made there!" Will it hurt them? Not likely. If, somehow, you not only managed to make a dip in their profits, but enough if one to be substantial on a timeline projection, a couple might be irrational enough to pull support and seek another company to leech off of, but most won't. The advice after the great depression did numbers on these people was to always cling to your accounts, because it's more fruitful to assume they're going to have value again later. So they're not going to notice much of a difference, and likely, they'll just push harder for these distasteful decisions that they believe will increase the target audience.

Ok so if it's not the ceo, who makes the decisions, and it's not the donors and stockholders, who encourage the decisions, who's left.

Mm. Yeah. Guess who you're hurting. It's the 23y/o college grad who has $134,000 in college debt and just managed to get their first apartment because the paycheck from their new job came in. It's the 60+ y/o who's still working the job she's had since the 80s because her retirement income would never be enough to afford her medical bills. It's the the masses of bottom rung, """unimportant,""" has-literally-no-say, hourly wage-based income, filler staff. First hired first fired, and "inconsequential". You're hurting each other, kiddo. That's you. What the fuck kind of good is that going to do.

This is not to say, oh la, let the company be terrible, it's perfectly fine to be homophobic racist trash and sell it for a hundred bucks.

No

But this is to say please stop and think about how you're going about this. Frankly the "if" in this situation, ~if you manage to affect their profits at all~ is already as big as the damned grand canyon. You're not going to affect them substantially, and certainly not on a long term. People just aren't that good at cutting stuff out of their lives permanently. Remember the nonsense a while back where a bunch of alt-right idiots were smashing their keurigs and burning their nikes cus they were mad about that company's politics? Wanna guess how many of those fools quietly replaced their destroyed possesion not too long after? Those companies didnt see a dip. They saw a marked increase. It became an advertising tactic to make a group of people furious because A the people who disagreed with the angry ones would buy stuff and B we have documented proof that the angry ones will replace their stuff!

Where am I going with this other than depressing you-dont-really-have-an-effect-on-the-big-picture,-kiddo land.

Piracy is fine. If you can't afford a textbook, yo ho, y'know? If you don't have access to a game or a console, shiver me timbers ye scurvey dog, t'ere's a classic emulator over there on t' horizon! An' a lovely chest o' ROM's! Movies via Google docs, ripped and copied software hosted in browsers, all that wonderful shit is fine. Please, be careful, a bunch of that junk is full of viruses, but have fun and make use of it. Piracy is not a victimless crime but digital Piracy definitely is.

But don't fool yourself into thinking piracy is activism. You're not making any kind of difference. They don't even know you exist. You are serving only you. And when you spend your time screaming about how problematic the company is on fucking tumblr they're still not going to notice you but you know who will? The 13y/o who's now going to be fucking guiltridden because they can't change anything and y'all make it sound like it's their fault.

If we're going to change anything in the ways these companies practice, we're going to have to very carefully actually target the people in charge. Petitions actually do work sometimes. Not consistently, and they can always ignore it, but sometimes these people in charge will actually hear our voices when there's names, ages, and a million of us on a stack of paper in front of them.

Quite frankly getting the practices labeled as illegal would be the most effective. Literally call your representative about these issues you feel so strongly about. If you're mad because company is racist, make an effort to make publishing racist material illegal. If you're mad because it's homophobic, reach out to the really big LGBT rights societies near you and see of you can't work out a march, or a picket.

I guess where I'm trying to go with this is make sure you know just who exactly you're hurting with your activism, and consider trying something more effective, efficient, and with less collateral damage. Find a way to target the people in power, or hold your fire. Please stop hurting each other, and please find a way to not be cruel to random kids on tumblr who don't know better can't fix anything and are not the problem here kaylaeighliea, stop yelling at them.