Follow @the-future-now

follow @the-future-now

This broke my heart all over again. I’d never really thought about Persuasion from Captain Wentworth’s perspective. And isn’t that a fairly universal aspect of love, too? Angrily wishing hurt upon someone who hurt you, and then the regret and the love and tenderness that comes afterward, the next time they’re in pain?

While we’re at it, let’s retire the notion that nothing good can ever possibly get done until and unless “old conservative people” are out of office. Especially when it comes to really local environmental stuff. Trust me, there’s a whole groundswell of people building local coalitions of unlikely allies who want to live better and who have decided to work together on that, despite having very different lives and ideological views.

Like the tobacco farmers and the public health advocates - mortal enemies, in the tobacco battles of the 90s - who got together in Virginia through some imaginative and talented mediators, and found they had a common interest in having healthy rural areas that allowed for other livelihoods than farming tobacco. Because they spent so much time building up trust and therefore their common power, when the tobacco companies settled in a massive multi-state lawsuit, Virginia was the only state in which people directly affected by tobacco got control over the money. Whereas in other states it just went into the general coffers (could've been used for tax cuts if lawmakers wanted), this group secured millions to establish a school of dentistry in this rural, unbelievably underserved area. Now, decades later, more people can be healthy and more kids have a realistic nearby option to grow up to do something other than farming a plant that kills people. Imagine if the mediators of that group had just decided they’d never be able to do anything until the old, conservative tobacco farmers and state politicians were gone.

Vote in the people you can work with to make a change. But don’t write off the people who are already there as useless in helping you make that change until you’ve already tried. Maybe some of those old, conservative people on the council grew up forming their own food and would be more willing than the 30-something moderate to make that possible for others in their neighborhood.

Expanded Consciousness

Oh, this is lovely. I particularly appreciate the nod to Ransom’s friend-oriented genius.

A little AU meet-cute based on @billypoindexter‘s prompt (someone else may have already done it, but I haven’t written any zimbits in forever):

So I was watching Say Yes to the Dress yesterday and Corbin Bleu and his fiancé (now wife) Sasha Clements were on it and when they asked how they met Sasha said they met in a grocery store and she kind of recognized him, and figured he was an acquaintance whose name she had forgotten. So she goes “Hey!! How are you?” and they chat for a bit before she realizes that she knows him because he’s famous.

Bitty was rounding the end of the cereal aisle, rechecking the grocery list to see if he’d gotten everything and wondering what was wrong with the state of public education in New England that none of his roommates had apparently learned basic penmanship, when he ran into someone.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry!” he exclaimed, and suppressed the wince as his accent reflexively came out full force. (It was partly the apologizing, and partly that he’d learned people were more forgiving if they thought he wasn’t from ’round here. He’d decided to embrace it; if he couldn’t get rid of the accent, it might as well be good for something.)

“No, no problem,” said the person, and then Bitty actually looked at him and felt that familiar terror of countless small-town grocery runs with his mother, where they ran into someone that he knew he was supposed to know, but could not place for the life of him, let alone remember an actual name.

“Well, hey!” he exclaimed, racking his brain frantically for the reason this guy looked so familiar. Surely he’d remember someone who looked like that. Lord. There was nothing, though, so he let autopilot take over. “How have you been?”

Tall, Dark, and Handsome blinked at him. (How could Bitty have forgotten eyes that blue? What even was wrong with him today? This was ridiculous.) “Uh, okay, actually. Yup. Everything going well.”

“Well, that’s great!” Bitty glanced at his list again. “Hey, can you read this? I genuinely can’t tell if this is supposed to be English.”

The guy obligingly took the paper from him and squinted at it. “Provolone, I think.”

Bitty took the list back and stared at it for a second. “I think you’re right. Honestly, Holster.”

“I was just heading toward the deli myself.”

“How perfect! I really kind of hate shopping by myself? But this was just supposed to be a quick in and out, or at least it was until I realized I apparently live with chickens in human guise who never learned to write properly.”

By the time Bitty and The Guy checked out and parted ways half an hour later, Bitty still hadn’t recalled his name, and by then it was clearly too late to admit it.

Oh well, he’d probably remember later, when he was trying to fall asleep.

~*~*~*~

“You know,” he called pointedly from the kitchen, “y’all could make yourselves useful and help me put all these things away.”

“Yes! Bro! Did you see that pass?” Holster yelled instead.

“Beauty,” Ransom answered, and then there was the sound of a high-five.

Bitty sighed and stuck his head around the corner to see what they were yelling about now.

SportsCenter, as usual, was on, playing highlights from the Falconers’ game the night before. As Bitty watched, it switched from the on-ice play to an intermission interview.

An intermission interview. With the guy from the grocery store.

Jack Zimmermann.

“Oh my god,” Bitty said for the second time that day, hands to his cheeks, which were indeed burning up.

Holster looked over at him in concern. “Bits? What’s wrong? Why do you look like a tomato?”

“I just spent half an hour casually grocery shopping with Jack fucking Zimmermann because I thought he looked familiar and I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t place him. Oh my god, I could just die.”

Ransom and Holster exchanged glances and then they were on him. “No shit! What’s he like? What did he buy? Tell us everything!”

“I can never shop there again,” Bitty said faintly.

yes - except it’s not an executive order and might not be, and the Pentagon is so far refusing to take it as policy.

i am led to understand that the backstory behind trump’s trans military ban is this: 

so congress is hashing out their military spending bill, and there was a divide between conservative/moderate republicans over whether the pentagon should fund trans surgeries. in an effort to render the issue moot and help the bill along, house republicans asked trump to simply issue an executive order on the topic. the idea being, if there’s an EO about funding trans surgeries, then congress doesn’t need to bother debating or writing it into the bill one way or the other and they can finally move on to other matters

but trump fucked up; instead of putting an order restricting the military funding of trans surgeries, he declared he was completely banning trans people from service. this is not what congress asked for and it has turned the whole situation into a boondoggle. one republican aide has likened it to trump being asked to light a candle and setting the table on fire instead. this move may in fact endanger the military budget bill, and mire it in further debate on whether to overturn trump’s overreaching EO. add in the fact that trump does not like being told he fucked up, and will certainly dig his heels in, raising tensions between him and congress

so while it’s absolutely a malicious move that will endanger trans service members and will certainly further poison public discourse about trans people in general, there’s at least the silver lining that the order has been administered so incompetently that it’s going to throw a wrench into the republican agenda

I assumed that Flint's Treasure Island death was just a rumor is Black Sails-verse, just because tonally it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And Jack Rackham's whole ending monologue is about how stories diverge from fact over time, which allows for wiggle room between the show and book.

Listen the heartbreaking thing is that Treasure Island is James Flint’s greatest fear. He says in the absolutely iconic Freedom in the Dark speech that I am still not over

“We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories distorted to fit into their narrative until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children.”

And that is what happens. That is what Treasure Island is: the definitive pirate story, in which Captain Flint is nothing more but a monster. A novel that almost every child reads….Flint literally becomes a monster in the stories they tell their children. A man who tried to change things, to destroy the myth of the inevitability of empire, to remake the new world…becomes a monster in that empire’s stories. 

Well great, anon, now I’m crying. 

I mean, the entirety of Black Sails is about stories. The irony is that the reason James is so effective as Flint is precisely because of the myth he himself creates around Flint - and yet in that myth, he is the monster. He has to be, that’s the only way that myth retains power. That label plagues him, as John Silver points out to him (John Silver, conveniently, is “not int he least bothered by whatever labels anyone decides to afix to you.” This doesn’t change - his “I don’t care” in response to Flint’s speech in 4x10 is literally the same sentiment). Part of what makes the war/rebellion so effective is the story of Long John Silver that Billy comes up with. Jack is absolutely obsessed with the reputation he’ll have and the stories they’ll tell about him - seriously, it’s a running gag, and when he goes to Philadelphia he realizes just how much those stories get twisted. 

The thing is, queer people have always struggled to tell their own stories, from their perspective. Stories in which they’re not monsters or predators, in which they aren’t insane or diseased or wrong or perverted. Stories in which they don’t die. Stories of their lives as they are. I could come up with dozens of examples. The way that queer people are told “don’t shove it in our faces” while the media is covered with heterosexuality. The way that an entire generation of queer people was lost to the AIDS crisis because the government completely ignored it - and their lives and their stories and their experiences create a glaring gap. The way that Forster’s novel about two gay men who get a happy ending, Maurice, couldn’t be published until after his death, in the 1970s, even though it was written in 1914. The way that the queer character always dies, or the queer couple never gets a happy ending in the media, with very few exceptions. The way that queerness is coded as monstrous in horror cinema. I mean, I could go on for a while here. 

Flint, in his “Freedom in the Dark” speech, is talking about exactly that. He is a queer man who is fighting for (among other things, including, yes, revenge fueled by rage) the right to be who he is without shame, who implores John Silver to not go down in history as a monster - and John Silver, who is, as far as I can tell, a straight man, looks him in the eyes and says “I don’t care.” Another queer story is erased, told in such a way as to profit those in power. 

In a way, then, since Black Sails is the prequel to Treasure Island, I suppose John Silver’s choice was predictable (though hindsight is 20/20).  Treasure Island is the story that we’re left with about what happened, and the finale tells us how that story came about. 

So yes, Treasure Island is absolutely fake news and untrue and not what actually happened, but on a kind of meta-level, that very fact is still super important, because the story that gets left behind, even if it’s not actual fact, is important. You could say the whole story of Black Sails is the tragedy of queer stories being erased, of Black Sails being transformed into Treasure Island by those who wield power. And those stories have power - even if they’re not true, they affect things. They change things. James Flint knows this, and that is why he is so scared of going down as a monster in their stories.