#researchrabbithole

Wednesday research rabbit hole, and this one's a favorite.

Pirate crews in the 1725 Caribbean operated under written "ship's articles," actual contracts. Here's what was in them: loot division rules, elected captains who could be VOTED OUT, and injury compensation — lose a limb in a fight, get a payout, written into the agreement beforehand.

That is more codified labor protection than most legitimate workers had at the time. These were people the official system had failed, building their own system instead. Not lawlessness. An alternative structure with its own logic and its own accountability.

This is the world Branwyn St. Pierre commands in St. Pierre Legacy, and honestly, it recontextualizes her whole character for me. She's not winging it; she's running an operation with rules, and she enforces them.

It’s easy to blame joint pain on getting older. But what if there’s something else? Something hidden.

I spent weeks reading studies from Harvard and Stanford about a weird culprit: fluoride. It’s in everything, and over the years, it settles in your joints, quietly destroying collagen. It’s not about suddenly being “old.” It’s about a decades-long buildup that no amount of glucosamine pills can touch.

I got curious and tried a liquid formula built to address exactly this. It’s a blend of Himalayan herbs—Tamarind, Moringa, Pine Bark—designed to first detox and then rebuild.

The taste is earthy, almost nothing. The results were slow. Week one was unremarkable. By week three, my morning back stiffness had eased, genuinely. It felt less like a drug and more like my body was just getting back to where it was supposed to be.