I’ve always been a fan of the Age of Exploration (despite the fact that our country pretty much got the short end of the stick during Spanish Imperialism). Plus, hello, pirates.

One of my friends wanted to see it because it’s a part of her heritage (being part Spanish herself) so the rest of us indios decided to accompany the illustrado as she touched base with her colonial oppressor roots. Just kidding Yani.

The Galeón Andalucía is a replica of an 18th century Galleon, which may bother some people. Personally, I don’t mind a bit of air-conditioning inside the hold. The ship is crewed by Spanish sailors, which explains why my tour group was full of Povedans eager to try their luck conversing with these strapping men, as the voiceover in the video above suggests.

Imagine crossing the ocean in this thing. It must’ve rocked and heaved a lot during a storm. It seems built to last though — the entire wooden (pine? It smells like pine) structure was sturdy enough to carry all the gawking tourists snapping photos and taking videos. Apparently the ship was featured on the news the night before we went, so there was more of a crowd when we went, compared to the day before. Another friend of mine said that Hank aka Jack Sparrow was their unofficial tour guide the day before. Lucky buggers.

On the flipside, the day after I went, my wife tried to go with some friends — and discovered that the line to see the Galleon stretched all the way from the pier to the Manila Hotel. That’s… crazy.

Finally, I’m all for cultural exchange, but what I really want is a place just like the captain’s quarters:

Hoist the colors!

Boy, am I wiped from last night’s Talk Like A Pirate Day festivities. I was at Big Sky Mind, downing rum coke after rum coke served by Captain Jack Sparrow and Tia Dalma, who you might remember from my Cosplay Mania reports.

According to Tia, if you toast without touching glasses and looking in the eyes of the person you’re toasting, you will have seven years bad sex, including self-pleasure. It goes without saying that I toasted her (and everyone else) properly all night.

Anyway, while I recover from last night’s revelries, enjoy Arnold Schwarzenegger’s complete Japanese commercial filmography!

(The entire clip is 10 minutes long, but keep at it, it gets even better! The Alinamin V spots are particularly WTF )

Ahoy! Today be the day of days, International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Aye, today be the day we raise our tankards of ale, rum, grog, or whatever have ye to our mistress the Sea, and the scurvy dogs what sail her vast bounty, to the buccaneers what answer to no law but their own!

Arrr but I hear bellyachin’ among ye, “Please sir, Cap’n Cliff, we are humble landlubbers and our tongues and ears are unaccustomed to the speech of the noble pirate!” Fret no more, ye lily-livered bilge rats! The fine lads and lasses at YARR.ORG be providin’ us with a handy guide to pirate speak, just for the occasion. Learn the difference between Arrr and Arrrgh!

An’ for ye scallawags lookin’ to have yer decks swabbed (if ye get my meanin’), the gents at talklikeapirate.com have obliged us with a Top 10 List of Pirate Pickup lines!

10 . Avast, me proud beauty! Wanna know why my Roger is so Jolly?

9. Have ya ever met a man with a real yardarm?

8. Come on up and see me urchins.

7. Yes, that is a hornpipe in my pocket and I am happy to see you.

6. I’d love to drop anchor in your lagoon.

5. Pardon me, but would ya mind if I fired me cannon through your porthole?

4. How’d you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?

3. Ya know, darlin’, I’m 97 percent chum free.

2. Well blow me down?

And the number one pickup line for use on International Talk Like a Pirate Day is …

1. Prepare to be boarded.

And lastly, me hearties, ye best be playin’ the embedded videos in this post. No better teacher than the master himself, Captain Jack Sparrow!

Now if ye’ll excuse me, I smell a change in the wind, says I.

Take what you can! Give nothin’ back!

Wow, it’s been a pretty exciting few days for Project Otaking, hasn’t it? So, for all my wonderful readers, trolls, and fellow pirates, I bring you: Why is the Rum Gone Remix!

Nice beat

And for reference, here is the original:

But why is the rum gone?!

Most people who aren’t pirate fans themselves tend to be confused at the enthusiasm and gusto with which pirate otaku throw themselves into the part. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to the “Yo ho hoist the colors” type of pirate, not the “Burn fake DVDs with torrents off the Internet and sell in bazaars” kind.)

For starters, pirates tend to have bad teeth and bad breath. Jack Sparrow could knock out a man by breathing on him. It’s true!

Pirates also tend to be extremely unreliable as allies. “Keep to the Code” from the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy simply meant “Every man for himself,” which is why the crew left Jack Sparrow behind, after he fell behind — and as everyone who’s seen the movie knows, he fell behind because Will Turner, pirate-in-the-making, double-crossed him by knocking him out with an oar. Mostly because Jack was going to double-cross him by turning him over to Barbossa. Ah, pirates.

A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything.

Another treacherous pirate, this one from a spaceship, is Jayne Cobb from Firefly, which is essentially the space cowboy pirate show. (This also explains why I love it so much.) When Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the Firefly-class transport (and space pirate ship) Serenity first asked him why he didn’t turn them all over to the Feds to claim the reward, Jayne replied, “The pay wasn’t good enough.” When Mal asked, “What happens when it is?” Jayne simply replied, “Well… that’ll be an interesting day.” And it sure was.

Then there’s the matter of being wanted by the authorities. Sometimes for questioning, other times to be hung, keelhauled, drawn and quartered, shot, thrown to the sharks, or whatever punishment imposed by the law for disrupting the lawful commerce of goods, such as sugar, cotton, tobacco, and slaves. And we can’t have the slave trade disrupted now, can we? Wouldn’t be civilized!

Then, of course, there’s the perils of the sea (or of space) itself. The hull could be breached and everyone could drown (or suffocate, whichever is applicable). The ship could be becalmed (or run out of gas). Nasty sea monsters (or space monsters) look at your ship and decide it’s snacktime. And there are always other pirates out there greedily rubbing their mitts at your ship and your booty.

So why do it at all? Freedom.

There is a scene in the first Pirates movie where Captain Jack Sparrow and Miss Swann are stranded on a desert island, drunk on rum. After a round of pirate drinking songs (“And really bad eggs…”) they collapse on the sand, and the Captain explains to Miss Swann what a ship is.

"And really bad eggs..."

“Wherever we want to go, we’ll go. That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck, and sails, that’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what the Black Pearl really is…is freedom.”

Perhaps being inebriated in the movie theater had something to do with it, but what Captain Jack Sparrow said at that moment really resonated with me. It was probably the booze since I was taking advice from a fictional pirate, come to think of it.

But this isn’t just some vague idea of “the pirate’s life.” Historically, pirate ships were run as democracies, more free and egalitarian than many of the land-based societies of the time, most of which afforded no upward mobility beyond the station or class which you were born into. Pirate captains were elected by majority vote, and were overthrown and marooned by majority vote, too. And everyone got a share of the booty.

Sure, a pirate’s life was hard, often “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as the philosopher Hobbes stated about life in the state of nature. (As opposed to the tiger Hobbes, who said “I don’t know which is worse: that everyone has his price, or that the price is so low.“)

Well, guilty. But at least they were free lives.

Big Damn Heroes.

So what does space pirate Malcolm Reynolds have to say about the subject of freedom? Let’s give the captain the last word:

“I tell you, Zoe, we get a mechanic, get her up and running again, hire a good pilot, maybe a cook…live like real people. A small crew – them’s as feel a need to be free. Take jobs as they come. Ain’t never have to be under the heel of nobody never again. No matter how long the arm of the Alliance might get, we’ll just get ourselves a little further.”

“…Get her running again?”

“Yeah.”

“So, not running now?”

“Not so much.”

I’m not feeling too well right now, but pirates make it all better. Why pirates are awesome is a subject for a future post, but in the meantime, here’s some blooper reels from the Pirates Trilogy!

I like mayonnaise!

Climb aboard the Davy Jones Crocodile Machine or whatever it’s called…

You can’t curse on a Disney Film, mate.

(This isn’t an in-depth comprehensive coverage of the event. This is just the stuff that happened to me when I dropped by.)

The ticket lady’s patience was on the end of its tether. “One hundred,” she barked at me, holding up the ticket in front of my face.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I avoided dismissing her as a bitch. Instead, I tried to see it her way — for the past two days she’s been crammed in a tiny booth dispensing tickets over and over again to endless lines of the weirdest people she’s ever seen, some of whom smell like cottage cheese stored under sweaty armpits. I’d be pissed too.

If I was normal.

=====

SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall was arranged in the usual way — events on the right, stores on the left. There didn’t appear to be any food to be had anywhere inside, which may have been a good thing. I pushed my way inside and started exploring the stalls. I bought a few pins, a frilly pirate hat for my First Mate, and the DVDs for Soul Eater, another series I ‘ought to have watched’.

A cosplay event was happening onstage. As usual, I ignored it and continued to mill around. Cons are very strange places to be at when you’re alone and don’t really know anyone. It’s like being in an alternate world with strangely-dressed natives and poor ventilation. I was trapped in a warehouse full of dusty toys and very-snobby crossdressers.

This was more organized than the last con I’d attended, which really isn’t saying much, considering how chaotic Komikon was. This had more polish, which again, really isn’t saying much.

As I was looking at a memorial wall of the work of a comic artist named Alcala who died in 2000, my arm got scratched by the ID of one of the con staff. I yelped and shot a hurt look of “WHY?” at him. He grinned at me and said “Oops.”

It stings.

=====

I walked around wondering what being part of the upper echelons of this lifestyle would entail. How radically different would I have to be to be with the ‘in-crowd’? How much time did I need to spend? What shows and books and music would I have to be into? Which people would I need to hate?

There was a very strong Us-versus-Them vibe here. People in costume shot suspicious glances at other costumed people across the hall. The MC warned people to keep an eye on their wallets and bags and other valuables.

I wasn’t here just to hang out though. I was collecting calling cards, flyers, leaflets. Artists, animation studios, voice actors, sculptors. This is Project Otaking after all. I still had a job to do, a mission to accomplish.

I looked around to see if I recognized anyone in the crowd but frankly I was staring at a sea of strangers. It felt like Japan again, I was an outsider looking in, seeing the tribe the way the anthropologist does instead of the way a tribesman would.

Again, I found myself wondering why the event wasn’t more awesome. I understood that ‘awesome’ was a highly-subjective thing, so all I really had was my own limited, prejudiced perspective on the whole thing — but that viewpoint saw very little awesome.  It seemed more organized. It was certainly more orderly. It was well-attended.

So what was it missing? Or was I wrong in expecting more than just… this? Whatever ‘this’ was?

=====

I watched a stall attendant stare blankly at the crowd. The day was winding down. Photographers blocked a main aisle to take pictures of the large Optimus Prime statue near the entrance, possibly one of the few images the mainstream readership would have a decent chance of recognizing.

I saw a bartender friend of mine, Hank, walk by dressed up as Jack Sparrow as he usually was at all these cons. I wanted to say hi and greet him. But in this strange topsy-turvy world, I was afraid he wouldn’t recognize me dressed up in a t-shirt and jeans.

Besides, I prefer to be Invisible at these things, like Jack Frost.

Or King Mob.

=====

It would be so easy just to hate everyone here like other people do, lump everyone into an imaginary average con-goer profile and hate everyone as a class. I do complain a lot. Sometimes expletives are involved and generously applied.

But that’s like Spider Jerusalem calling his readership The New Filth. It sounds derogatory. But it’s actually a term of reluctant endearment. Sure, people do stupid, weird, creepy, sometimes cruel things. But they’re my people. The New Filth is us.

And I didn’t go to this thing to stand out. I went to blend in.