Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

You have to make stuff up before you can write about it, and that mostly involves inhabiting the spaces and minds of the places and people you’re writing about. Most of that won’t ever appear on the page. Tolkien’s case is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, the sheer extent of the world he’s imagining. (Of course the book takes years to write! He’s making up the history of Númenor and Gondor from thin air!) Secondly, we have unusual access to his world-building materials in the Appendices, which makes the book feel even more fully formed and authoritative. We also have unusual access to his creative process in HoMe. It’s fucking incredible watching Númenor get invented. People joke that Tolkien didn’t finish things, and use his Númenorean time travel story as an example (Lewis publishes the reciprocal three book space travel stories). But that material IS published in a deeply meaningful way. It’s the whole texture that supplies the unique depth and believability of The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes people joke, “Oh, Tolkien barely published!” Yes, but he published The Lord of the fucking Rings. And an essay that revolutionised the study of Beowulf. I’d take that.

This quote also by necessity downplays the rewriting process of LotR which of course was years of painstaking craft and revision, and is its own story. But, yes, of course these things didn’t exist! He had to make them up! So if in doubt, go away and lie in the hammock or on the bed and gaze into nothing and really think about what the world of your story is like and how it feels and what it must be like to be inside the minds of the made-up people whose lives, for some bizarre reason, you want to make up. This actually is part of the work and it’s not frenetic. And there’s no real shortcut. But what is nicer? Why rush this?

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

*cools ur dashboard down*

Julian's constant outrage, disbelief at what he's seeing, and refusal to accept things as they are is also great. He never lets you forget how messed up this is, and I think it was a good opportunity to develop his character as well. It's one of the first really traumatic things that happens to him and the way he reacts to everything really shows it, along with the strength of his convictions and his stubbornness for doing what's right which he carries on right to the end of the series. His kindness also shines through when he helps the woman injured boy (against Sisko's objections) and the woman with diabetes in the processing centre.

Then there's Sisko, who tempers Bashir's outrage with (kind of paternal) pragmatism. He doesn't accept that things had to be that way and understands the wrongness of what he's seeing to its fullest extent, but unlike Julian, he knows what he can and can't do about it, and chooses to accept that there are some things he personally can't change but does everything he possibly can with the influence he has. This Includes taking a bunch of hostages at gun point (and it's actually crazy they had a Star Trek protagonist do that lol), which Julian is visually extremely uncomfortable about, and being prepared to give his life to ensure things get better. For me, he's the very image of a great Starfleet captain in these eps.

I have to also mention the obvious fact that both characters are people of colour who, despite being a decorated commander and a doctor, find themselves immediately written off as worthless by a white guard and discarded into a concentration camp. Meanwhile their white colleague ends up in a penthouse.