Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency quick sketch fan art. You can follow me on Instagram too where some of the actors have liked my work 😀 @holistic.artist
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
Police in the Dutch city of Rotterdam
have launched a new pilot programme which will see them confiscating
expensive clothing and jewellery from young people if they look too poor
to own them.
Officers say the scheme will see them target younger men in designer
clothes they seem unlikely to be able to afford legally – if it is not
clear how the person paid for it, it will be confiscated.
Rotterdam police chief Frank Paauw told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf: “They are often young men who consider themselves untouchable. We’re going to undress them on the street.”
The police are going to target marginalized people and if you can’t whip out a receipt for your clothes they will strip you in the street.
This reminds me of the medieval laws that banned peasants from wearing fancy clothing-
“Laws frequently prevented commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats and also could be used to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages, sumptuary laws in medieval cities were instituted as a way for the nobility to cap or limit the conspicuous consumption of the prosperous bourgeoisie.
If bourgeois subjects appeared to be as wealthy or wealthier than the
ruling nobility, it could undermine the nobility’s presentation of
themselves as powerful, legitimate rulers.”
Let’s just say it outright. This is about race.
This is disgusting and of course it is
$5 says trump is going to try and institute this somewhere.
I thought we got rid of sumptuary laws ages ago.
Also, I wear a gold chain and pendant my grandmother gave me, titanium earrings I pierced my ears with or gold earrings my aunt gave me, and I dress plainly. Is that cause for arrest now? Well, the Singaporean and Malaysian embassies will hear of this.
The Kingii is an emergency life preserver that you can strap right to your wrist that inflates in seconds and brings you straight to the surface of the water.
WOAH NO WAIT WHAT I AM A LIFEGUARD DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY MORE LIVES THIS SHIT CAN POTENTIALLY SAVE???!!!
As someone who likes doing water-related things like fishing but intensely fears drowning, I’m gonna need like three hundred of these, okay.
No no. No no no no no. No no no. NO.
This thing might help you if you are swimming in a controlled environment (a pool) with a lifeguard nearby and suddenly have an emergency, but it is not a substitute for a PFD (personal floatation device).
Pictured below are the five types of United States Coast Guard-approved PFDs:
Types I and II are designed to keep your head above water with no effort on your part. If you are on the water, regardless of your ability to swim, you need to wear one.
Anyways thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
I also seriously worry how many people will actually have the presence of mind to reach for their wrist and scrabble for a tiny level and yank on it while they’re drowning. Speaking as someone who has nearly drowned before, when you’re drowning, you’re often in such a blind panic, all you can think of is I’m going to die I need to get air I don’t want to die I need to get up. How many people are going to remember that thing on their wrist and how to operate it? For fuck’s sake, people have forgotten how to operate airplane seatbelts during crashes. Never underestimate how much panic can mess with your head.
And it may not even be ‘better than nothing’ if it instead lulls people into a false sense of complacency and they neglect to take proper precautions such as wearing a life vest, etc. that have been proven to work, and far more effectively.
Can you even imagine being the poor alien sod responsible for auditing an earthling spaceship’s spending allowance? Like:
“I see, and why do you require many tubes of white plant flavoured paste?”
“Oh well, if we don’t rub that on our teeth twice daily the bacteria living in my mouth will begin to devour me teeth.”
“…Noted.”
“I have also noticed several large shipments of specific medications, and a variety of individually packaged absorbent material – however injury records do not show sufficient numbers to justify these recurrent deliveries.”
“Ah, yeah, it’s not really an injury per say. As part of our natural reproductive cycle approximately half the population will shed the lining of one of their internal organs and expel it.”
“…that is the most horrifying thing that I have ever heard.”
“Yeah.”
“Does such a process not hurt?”
“That’l be what the medication’s for. Pain killers for the cramps, birth control to stop the process.”
“…and your reasoning behind the fully functional, high-tech entertainment system?”
“Okay, that we could probably do without. But in our defence that was actually insisted on as a standard feature of all fleet-ships expected to encounter Terrans. Admiral Plo’Kaght insisted on it. Something about bored humans and a an illegal betting ring featuring a cleaning robot with a knife strapped to it going up against a human with a mop?”
“…I believe I should speak with my superiors.”
I love how Stabby the Roomba has become such a consistent in-joke among these sorts of blogs.
Galactic hero stabby the roomba: his legend continues
‘In 1778, two Irish gentlewomen put on men’s clothing and ran away together. Lady Eleanor Butler had received several offers of marriage but was determined to share her life with her friend Sarah Ponsonby. […] They spent the rest of their lives in a black and white house called Plas Newydd outside Llangollen, cultivating their garden, improving their minds and filling the house with clocks, cabinets and “whirligigs of every shape and hue”. [They also had] a little dog called Sapho.’
FantasyBoudicca 