~I will not be afraid~

Aria Aber, from Hard Damage; “Rilke and I”

Us internet old timers organically learned this on a younger, wild west internet, when there weren’t streaming services or centralized social hubs. In the old internet, we were all spread around pretty much all across the webspace, in music forums, game forums, RP forums, chatsites, the works. We knew who we knew, and it was a very common occurrence that, if someone were to one day leave any given website and you didn’t have their e-mail, that was likely it, you never saw them again. The exchanging of e-mails, in fact, used to be almost like an intimacy test, something saying more or less “we’re tight now, if you leave one day, I want to still be able to be in touch with you”.

I’m not romanticizing the old net, it’s gone, it’s the present now, that isn’t the purpose of this post, the purpose of this post is to make it clear that times have changed, and we need to understand newer internet users’ first encounter with the internet is immensely different from what our first encounter was. There’s a paid service for everything, and humans will naturally gravitate towards the convenient option instead of learning a skill. We learned the skill to pirate and curate not because we were all just grizzled keyboard warlords back in the day, there simply was no other choice. Nowadays, there is a choice, and don’t try to get smug with me, I know a lot of people that should know better than use Spotify and all sorts of other convenience software even though you should, by all right, know better. Convenience is a fundamental pillar of mankind, for better usually, and for worse sometimes.

And this is a worse sometimes.

You’re not going to convince anyone by smugly telling them “oh? you don’t know how to pirate?” if you don’t follow that up with some instructions or advice on how to do it. If you’re the kind of cunt that just wants that little serotonin boost from lording over someone clearly younger and less experienced, godspeed, get the fuck out, if you would actually like to keep “the old ways” alive, for the sake of these new users, consider appending a little advice on how to torrent or where to get started.

Will may have learnt How To Pirate from Jack, from the first film and that crazy rescue mission (I mean, the last scene at the gallows says everything to me — the hat, the dramatic sword throw, the teamwork with the rope — he’s Jack’s protégé whether he likes it or not) And for a while I thought the same thing about Elizabeth, only then I realised: she didn’t learn piracy from Jack. She learnt it from Barbossa.

She’s always been more ruthless than Will, more efficient, more fierce. Most of the first film, she spent with Barbossa, and she knew he was dangerous. She was exasperated with Jack and underwhelmed by him when they were marooned, and came up with her own plan, completely without his help. She schemes and lies and plays it smart, she’s proud and dignified and she knows it.

Edit- I added the visualizer for this piece on my YT, check it out here