imagine you're an actor on black sails. you're just some random dude from australia or america doing shitty acting jobs (or royalty/maggie smiths son). then you get a part in this big pirate show. you get dumped in south africa and you're kind of just stuck there for four years. you spend it obsessively rehearsing and delivering the best performances of any of your lives in arguably one of the craziest stories ever told. then afterwards you go back to america or australia or england and for the rest of your life play side characters in like. The Flash and Umbrella Academy. or narrate pirate smut audiobooks. Crazy

the thing about black sails is you're always thinking about it. years will go by and you're still thinking about it. you're never over it. it's with you forever. you can't move on. you'll return to it again and again in your mind. an experience my good buddy john silver knows all about. come closer. have you heard the story of captain flint

it must’ve been so embarrassing for everyone on game of thrones when they fumbled the ending so bad after black sails managed to achieve everything they were trying for two years earlier with a much smaller budget. like well lit fight scenes, intricate politics, morally gray characters with shifting alliances, sea battles, epic stories told on a focused character level, waxing poetic on the nature of stories and storytelling and the way they shape reality… like damn y’all really are just out there reheating jonathan steinberg and robert levine’s nachos

i genuinely think boats are such good places to set a story because it automatically gives you a set of really interesting circumstances -- boats are transitory, you are not meant to stay on them forever, there is an automatic assumption of ending up somewhere different from where you started...characters are forced into close proximity, stakes are higher, etc. boats also just look cool, so that's always a plus

james flint's most endearing trait is that he understands women to be inherently three-dimensional, complex and deserving of respect (especially for the positions of authority they occupy). in contrast, he is barely convinced that most men have brains.

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

Shakespeare is like this

If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.