biceratops7:

Crying in the club after rewatching this scene:

Gosh why is that such a beautiful line? For real we’ve all been sleeping on it. Out of universe, this whole episode is about cluing everyone too oblivious or traumatized by queerbaiting in to the fact that Ed and Stede are in love. It’s just 30 minutes of these middle aged men trying to impress each other, make each other smile, make each other’s days brighter, enough to have the chance to do it again and again.

Ed and Stede have well and truly lived their lives. Stede’s been married for at least 10 years and has two children, Ed is a grizzled pirate with a salt and pepper beard and old man knee problems. They are not the kind of people society casts even a glance towards when it comes to entering new relationships. Lucius knows this. (And deep down so does Ed.) There’s such a desperation to his speech here. He’s much younger but he knows as a gay man that they both need to cling to the belief of last minute second chances because sometimes it’s all they have. Lucius “escaped” the hell of never allowing himself to love someone while he was still young but in this scene he’s telling Ed that he still has time, and Stede does too. He’s telling him he owes it to Stede to not squander it.

So here they are in their 40’s traipsing around Saint Augustine trying to create a “deeply cool adventure”, inventing fake restaurants to meet each other at, giving encouraging words no matter how ridiculous he’s being, using precious drinking water to rinse off a rock cause hey, maybe it could be just one more thing to lift his spirits…

The old trees still have some fruit to give after all.

fieldbears:

bookhobbit:

the THING about Oluwande is that his competence level is “night manager who has worked in this 24 hour McDonalds for 4 years and knows all possible McDonalds scenarios but outside work his life is not even a little bit together” and the thing about Jim is that their competence is “wildly experienced mechanic who can fix literally anything in the 24 hour McDonalds with a wrench and some duct tape but can’t figure out how to heat up a burger without burning it” and the rest of the crew is “has been working in the 24 hour McDonalds for a maximum of two weeks, and doesn’t know how to do anything”. except Buttons, who is “has worked in this specific 24 hour McDonalds for 15 years, but still causes regular incidents any time he is at the cash register”.

#stede has the energy of a guy who has never eaten at a mcdonald’s but has recently purchased a franchise ( @forpiratereasons )

redshiftsinger:

I realized something today (OFMD meta impending)

Ed’s whole plan in the beginning, to escape from the Spanish. Before the lighthouse fuckery. It would have worked. He got it right.

See, here’s the thing. The official DATE of the full moon isn’t necessarily the day before the night it falls on. It’s the “day” as calculated from midnight to midnight that the moment the peak of lunar fullness is achieved occurs. Doesn’t matter if that’s two seconds after midnight, if it’s *after midnight*, the calendar lists the full moon as being the next day.

So officially, the full moon can be on September 2nd, but at the same time it can, for all practical purposes – like, y'know, knowing when the spring tide is (that’s “spring” as in “springy” not as in the season, by the way; the tide that has the most variation between high and low, due to the combined effects of lunar and solar gravity at the full and new moon) – occur on the night following September 1st, no matter which side of midnight the true peak of it happens to fall.

We know that Ed is a brilliant sailor. The most brilliant sailor Izzy’s ever met, in Izzy’s own words even as Izzy’s trying to insult him, he still has to admit that. So… what makes more sense? That a brilliant sailor who can read the coming weather in the clouds and all that would miss noticing for an entire six months that all the spring tides are a day off, because he forgot it’s a leap year? OR that he knows exactly when the spring tide will occur, but he just… doesn’t sail by the calendar. Because the lunar cycle doesn’t match up with the calendar very neatly, so what use does the calendar have in knowing what to expect from the tides, when you could just keep track of the moon instead? It’s implied that he’s at best only partially literate – he can’t write, he can perhaps read a bit, but probably not very well. He certainly never got a formal education about things like calendars and letters, but he never really needed that in order to get very very good at what he’s very very good at – he’s certainly not unintelligent, just uneducated.

He had the plan right, in every way that mattered, except in being able to explain it flawlessly to those who DO have an education about shit like calendars, but have never thought about things like the midnight-to-midnight delineation of what counts officially as a “day” in a practical light – they don’t know to take it into account, and Ed doesn’t know to point it out. Look who it is who says he’s wrong – it’s Izzy, who’s not definitely literate but is implied to be able to read better than Ed can at least, and then Lucius, who is literally a professional scribe, backs Izzy up – Lucius most definitely can read a calendar. Aside from Stede, who’s currently both recovering from being hanged and stabbed and also definitely having some very complicated and overwhelming feelings of the Gay Awakening sort and is thus quite understandably intellectually useless at the moment, Lucius is the only one aboard definitely confirmed to be able to read, and Izzy is implied to be able to (and I’d argue that having him so confidently correct Ed’s mistake about the date is further evidence that he IS literate, that he got more of a formal education at some point).

Ed, though. He’s aware he’s not educated; he’s a smart man, he knows he’s never had certain opportunities that others have been granted. He’s not ignorant of his ignorance of that realm. He knows that Izzy, and Lucius, have had access to knowledge that he’s never had. And he feels like that makes them qualified to correct him. Even though he’s RIGHT. They’re also right, in their own way – it IS the 1st, the official date of the full moon IS the 2nd. But they’re wrong, because the date isn’t what matters. The tide is what matters, and Ed may not always get the calendar, that he can’t read without a struggle, quite right but he knows the tide. He knows, but he also wavers. He doesn’t trust himself enough in the face of two educated men telling him he’s wrong; it’s enough that he doubts himself. He’s also a traumatized man, who grew up being told over and over that he’s just not those kind of people. He realizes he did make a mistake, it’s not the 2nd, it was a leap year. He forgot to account for a leap year when he was keeping track of what the date was, all this time. And because he’s, frankly, a bit shit at emotional regulation… well, as far as he can figure in the moment, if he made that mistake then they must also be right that the full moon is tomorrow, he’s fucked the whole thing up, they won’t have a spring tide to make the plan work.

But he was right. In all the ways that functionally mattered. If Izzy could’ve just shut his mouth and trusted that the most brilliant sailor he’d ever met would know the fuck when the spring tide will occur even if he mucked up a tiny, insignificant detail about the calendar, the plan would’ve worked.

I’m having a lot of feelings about this.

jamiedodgerart:

thinkin abt pirate show at work