Weekly Geekly Rundown for Talk Like a Pirate Day 2025
It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day and though the celebrations of the day are far less frequent now than they were in the Time When Tigers Used to Smoke, that makes it all the more vital for me to issue my annual reminder to celebrate "Play Like a Pirate Day" rather than participate in "Talk Like a Pirate Day." Unless you are going to go big. If you go big with your “Talk Like a Pirate Day” observations, then by all means feel free to celebrate in style.
Most people don’t go all in on the celebration though, which is why since the before times in the not now (2008) I’ve been regularly posting recommendations of things to do other than half-heartedly makin’ piratical references that are guaranteed to annoy your coworkers to the point they want to make you walk the plank. Since these are annual-ish posts, they all contain similar information, but each year I update the call to arms with some minor differences to make sure that the recommendation links stay up to date and that my recommendations include at least one new way to play.
The inspiration for this annual post was my belief that one of the most irritating things you can hear your co-workers say is, "Aaaargh, Avast, Ye Mateys" a couple times an hour in some half-hearted participation in a day of international live action role playing. Even worse are the inconsistent uses of "Yar!"
It’s not annoying that people walk around talking like pirates, what’s really irritating is the fact that these small offerings of participation are lackadaisical at best. I love it when people get into character, but I find ironic and hipster detachment annoying and am bored when someone does something with a lack of real commitment.
I would rather a co-worker show up dressed in full "Age of Sail" apparel, blunderbuss and cutlass in hand, and charge into the office while staying in character as much as is possible for the entire day. A wholehearted celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day? That, I can get behind. It would be fun, in the "employees showing up to work in costumes on Halloween" kind of way. You know what I mean. I mean when a person comes to work in their full blown Optimus Prime costume, one where they can actually "transform" from robot to big rig.
Things like that create moments where you are truly impressed with your co-workers commitment. On the other hand, when your other co-worker shows up with only a pair of "cat ears" on and a mild scowl on their face, it's annoying.
Most participation in International Talk Like a Pirate Day is of the cat ear type, and not the Optimus Prime type. That's why I still believe that it is time for the phenomenon to die. That doesn't mean that we should no longer have a day "celebrating" piracy and the outlaw attitude, or as the founder of Talk Like A Pirate Day called it "Piratitude." Pirates are still awesome (though not as awesome as Transforming Psionic Robot Pirate Ninja Dinosaur Mutant Demon Hunting Vampires), it's just that inserting random "arrrrs" like a pirate that is lame. I think gamers, and geeks of all kinds, should lay claim the holiday and re-cast it as "International Play Like A Pirate Day." That way the costume role players can cosplay pirate and other people can play pirate themed games, read pirate themed novels, or watch pirate themed films.
As I wrote a couple of yeas ago, "from now on September 19th will be a day when families and friends get together and enjoy some form of Piratical Recreation. Such recreation can include celebrating by talking like pirates, certainly role play (in the traditional sense) is play. Our celebration is inclusive, not exclusive. But families and friends will no longer be limited to listening to the 'yars' and 'aaarghs' of everyone around them. Some might choose more formal ludographic participation in the celebration by choosing to experience Talk Like a Pirate day via game play."
Since this is also a Weekly Geekly, you’ll get a mix of “normal” geeky recommendations and piratical goodness.
As I mentioned in the last Weekly Geekly Rundown, LYT has changed the name of his Substack to Mortal Cinema. I thought it was a good change that highlighted one of the primary focuses of his writing, but still allowed for him to do his action figure reviews etc. This week, he shares his reasoning behind the name change. He’s owned the url for some time and is making good use of it and touches on the challenges of finding the right name for a website, something that I’ve worried about myself recently.
Luke was my editor when I wrote as a freelancer for a Voice Media site called Topless Robot and I mentioned before that he changed the name of that site. At the time, I believed he did so because of pressure from the publisher, but I was wrong. Luke was trying to find a name that would expand the opportunities for him and his staff to write about pop culture properties because a combination of an expansion of who participated in nerddom (a good thing) and the rise of ocular democracy (a bad thing that leverages the Spiral of Silence and Preference Falsification) made the website’s name a hinderance to recruiting the new audience and getting access to content to review. This lack of access included the WWE for reasons Luke discusses here.
I’ll be honest that when Luke first invited me to write as a freelancer for the site, I was hesitant due to the name and the fact that I worked at a non-profit focused on youth civic engagement. I overcame my resistance when I read the articles Luke was publishing and saw the content other freelancers were creating. Luke was a great editor and curator of content and when Luke changed the name to The Robot’s Voice, a move that leveraged the Village Voice name, I no longer merely liked writing for the site I felt proud to write for it. That’s my way of saying that even though I dislike ocular democracy, I think Luke was right to change the name. I just wish they’d kept the site going and not allowed someone else to take over the older name, and apparently the content though I’m not sure that’s right and proper.
In his review of the most recent Downton Abbey film, Luke makes an interesting comparison between it and The Long Walk. Julian Fellowes Gosford and Downton stories were always about the intersection of class and the less desirable aspects of modern society, so I think Luke’s comparison is a good one. Unlike Luke, I’m a big fan of Gosford Park, not for the manners but for the way that the manners are an attempt to hide something rotten. I always think of the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Doyle’s The Lost World at moments like this, because their endings highlight the rot within the porcelain and beautiful exterior of the modern world.
It’s the kind of tension I highlight when I talk about why Los Angeles is my favorite city in the world. When most people envision Los Angeles, they think of wealth, glamor, and beaches. When they finally arrive in LA, they realize that that description applies to Huntington (pronounced Hunnington) Beach and Carlsbad and that Los Angeles is an often dirty place with what Nathanael West’s protagonist (Tod Hackett) in Day of the Locust called the “ticky tacky” architecture of the town. There’s a kind of squat uniformity to both the poorer parts of town like Crenshaw and the more affluent areas like Culver City. Sure, you’ve got the wealth of Beverly Hills and San Marino, but most of the houses are that stucco ticky tacky house under the freeway. They expected to see a diamond and instead see a pockmarked and dirty rock.
But these people haven’t really seen Los Angeles either, because Los Angeles really is a beautiful place. It is filled with magical corners of wonder and highlights the best of America, even as you can see the worst of it. Los Angeles is like a geode. You have to crack it open to get to the true beauty and that beauty is in the people who live there. While this doesn’t directly connect with the themes that Luke is writing about, his writing reminded me once again of how the way that class and conflict interconnect in Los Angeles are a part of what makes the place so special to me.
Brent Hartinger of The Real Story has an article about 5 movies that he thinks are great, except for the fact that they have a stupid plot twist. While I don’t agree with him that all of these particular twists are stupid, and to be fair he even critiques one of his choices, but I think this is the kind of conversation I’d like to see more people engage in when talking about films. Instead of just focusing on the flaws and writing a snarky piece, instead focus on the excellence while also acknowledging the imperfection. It’s a kinder approach. For example, there is no doubt in my mind that Three Days of the Condor is a brilliant film. It is also among my favorite espionage films. I find the last 5 minutes distinctly disappointing though because I live in the modern world where the public doesn’t trust the media and it makes the “solution” of the film have a more Butch Cassidy ending than an “everything is okay now” All the President’s Men one.
As you all know, I am a HUGE table top gaming nerd. Even after culling my collection over the past five years, I still own hundreds of board games and have a very large selection of role playing games. Like many others, the game that got me started was Dungeons & Dragons and while my first time playing the game was terrible I am a life long fan of every edition of the game. Sure, I have come to prefer the older editions of the game, but some of my absolute best memories with friends were playing 4th edition and some of my fondest memories with my daughters are of running Tails of Equestria the My Little Pony Role Playing Game for them and of running 5th and 6th Edition for them and their friends. Yes, I consider 2024 to be a 6th edition, but not in an edition wars pejorative way. There are more changes between the 2014 and 2024 edition than there are between any of the 7 editions of Call of Cthulhu.
I recently got a copy of the newest Starter Set and I was really impressed. I’ll be doing a review soon and, while the art has some quirks, I think it is a great introductory product that shows that Hasbro is trying to refocus on core brand elements in a way they drifted from recently. You can see that attempt to return to core brand in the latest video promoting the Starter Set. My friend Bill Rude got to work on this video doing some of the VFX and Graphics for Dark Burn Creative and I think you can see some significant differences in intended audience from more recent product offerings. This is meant for a much broader audience, rather than for a subset of the fandom.
In tune with Play Like a Pirate Day René-Pier Deshaies of Fari RPGs has a brand new “Salt and Steel” (aka Pirate) themed role playing game called Boundless Tides available TODAY. I haven’t had time to go over it in detail, but I’ll be adding this to my list of games.
Shadowrun has long been one of my favorite role playing games thematically, but mechanically it’s gone from being fiddly to a big mess to fiddly again. Sean McCoy has an interview at Win Conditions with Courtney Campbell, the designer of the Sinless role playing game, that discusses how Sinless captures the thematic feel of Shadowrun without getting too bogged down with system complexity and how adding Old School elements inspired by Raymond Feist’s Midkemia game products adds depth to your settings.
Chris McDowall gives us a brief look at his life and professional biography, a timeline that leads to his excellent role playing game creations, in his most recent Bastionland Presser. I’ve been a fan of Chris’s since I first say the tiny book that was the first edition of Into the Odd and have frequently looked to his work for inspiration. I am still developing my own Steam and Revolutions setting for Dungeons & Dragons. It’s inspired by the Russian Revolutions (yes, that’s plural on purpose), the Richard Sharpe novels, Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage Trilogies, Sebastien DeCastell’s Greatcoats series, and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. Even as I have a lot of literary and historical inspirations, McDowell’s Bastionland works are a loadstone guiding me to select only what really matters.
Matt Thompson has a really interesting post and interview up in his latest Critical Hit Parader where he discusses an ideal Led Zeppelin concept album imagining what a soundtrack to a Led Zeppelin Role Playing Game would be. It’s a great list of recommended songs and an inspired look at what a Led Zeppelin role playing game might look like. If you are a Ledhed and you like RPGs, then this is definitely for you.
As always, Dr. Rebekah King’s latest Horror Moments entry at her Dr King's Curiosities Substack is well worth a visit. She opens the piece by asking the wonderfully enticing question, “are you afraid of liminal spaces?” The term “liminal” is one that is overused in literary criticism to discuss ideas and constructs that are transitional or unstable/uncertain and I’ve often wondered why they didn’t use the word intermundia more often. Ever since I read Lucretius’ discussion of the Spaces Between, and Lovecraft’s tales of the “Gods” who live there, I’ve thought that intermundia was a term that could be used as a replacement much of the time.
In this case, Dr. King is using the term in its literal and more traditional sense. She is discussing places like the hallway in The Shining or the shadowy closet of a young child that make us feel uneasy. It’s a wonderful turn of phrase here and her discussion of Edward Gorey’s book The West Wing, not the Presidential one, and how it evokes dread is a delight to read. One of my copies of Poe’s tales has Gorey illustrations and this wordless book looks to inspire the imagination even more. This is a book that inspires the telling of new tales, rather than illustrating existing ones.
Retroist has a couple of great podcast episode’s up this week. The first is about the television show Press Your Luck, no whammies! The show premiered on this day 42 years ago, fans of The Hitchiker’’s Guide series know why this is important, and it was a truly interesting and unique game show. The recent movie The Luckiest Man in America touches on Michael Larson’s exceptional run on the show and how he used their own system against them. I expected the movie to be a comedy, but instead found myself touched by the episode. Walton Goggins is particularly moving as the show’s host Peter Tomarken. Goggins’ version of Tomarken starts off a bit smarmy, but as the emotional stakes get higher he transforms completely.
The movie also provides a wonderful glimpse into the logic Television Executives use to make their decisions. All of which makes me miss the old Showtime show Beggers & Choosers. It is the single best show I’ve seen on the TV industry and, along with Rob Long’s books Conversations with My Agent and Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke, provides a great insider look at the tensions producers face. Long’s sections on the upfronts in particular are vital here.
Also released 42 years ago, on Wednesday, is the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. During Covid, my family partnered with my good friend Chris “Doc” Wyatt and his kids to do a weekly remote Saturday Morning Cartoons viewing and discussion marathon. During that marathon we watched Thundarr, The Herculoids, Space Ghost, and Dungeons & Dragons. It was a wonderful experience and helped keep me sane throughout the year and a half of isolation. I recorded the interview discussions with the kids intending to blog about them, but have never gotten around to it.
Because it’s Play Like a Pirate Day, I’m going to recommend both role playing ang board games today. I’ll start with one of my favorite games, Pinnacle Entertainment Group's historical role playing game Pirates of the Spanish Main. It’s a fast, furious, and fun system that perfectly captures the feel of the pirate films of yore.
Playing a pirate themed role playing game is great for those who want to talk like a pirate. It encourages engaging in Piratical behavior in an appropriate venue. Besides, by role playing (in the game sense) participants can act far more Piratical than is allowed under modern mores and laws. Your coworkers might object to you stealing their stuff and flying off to Tortuga to sell it in exchange for Rum!
If you want a more heroic bent with some really interesting mystical aspects, you can always play Pinnacle's 50 Fathoms instead. This is a transported world story where the player characters begin the game as sailors in our world, only to find themselves in a world of wonder and magic. There’s a little bit of One Piece and a little bit of Pirates of the Caribbean in it and it is great fun
If you aren't a fan of the Savage Worlds system, but still want to play an excellent pirate and swashbuckling role playing game you should check out 7th Sea! 7th Sea combines the mechanics of the Legend of the Five Rings role playing game, heavily influenced by Vampire the Masquerade, and applies them to a fictional fantasy setting of piratical goodness. Like many games drafted in the 1990s, the game uses factions and has a larger metanarrative.
If “Neo-Old School” is your bag, why don’t you check out Pirate Borg? It’s a recent pirate adaptation of the doom art-punk RPG Mörk Borg. The mechanics are easy to learn and the combination of piracy and supernatural horror is a match made in…well Disneyland rides.
If you are looking for an easy to learn and quick to play pirate themed game, you can’t do better than the Tiny d6 game Tiny Pirates. Like all of the games Alan Bahr works on, this is a true labor of love and the game is easy to play and can be run with almost no prep.
Play a Pirate Themed Board Game
There are a number of excellent Pirate themed board games, but my own tastes tend a little towards the older games. If you own a copy -- and not many do -- play an exciting session of the classic Broadsides and Boarding Parties. I remember when my friend Sean and I stopped using the official rules for combat and exchanged the Basic D&D rules for them. It wasn’t long before his copy of Broadsides and Boarding Parties became the prop for a pirate themed D&D campaign.
If you don't own a copy of Broadsides, try one of these two excellent pirate games from GMT Games. Blackbeard: The Golden Age of Piracy. The game is a redesign of Avalon Hill's classic game of the same name. The new version is suitable for 1 to 5 players and has less "down time" for players who aren't in their current turn.
I had considered doing a musical recommendation set based on pirate movies and pirate themes, but then I watched the most recent Greyson Nekrutman video on Drumeo. Greyson is a jazz drummer, YouTuber, and the drummer for Sepultura. He loves music across eras and genres and is a blast to watch. In this most recent “Impossible Medley,” Greyson transitions between songs and genres with fluidity and easy, all while demonstrating that it isn’t the size of the kit that matters but the skill of the musician. I’ve decided to share his video and then to share full videos of the songs within the medley and follow this up with a typical Geekerati-esque spiral into a tangent.
1990
March of the Pigs would come in here, but I am pushing it to the bottom because it is what sparked my tangent. That makes the Duke Ellington composition Caravan the original is very smooth and fun to listen to. Buddy Rich has an iconic performance of the song and I also enjoy Greyson’s own interpretation of the jam.
We shift from Jazz to the Jazz, Blues, and Folk inspired music of Led Zeppelin and John Bonham’s phenomenal drumming.
We then shift into the driving stuttering engine-like opening of Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher. As impressive as Eddie Van Halen’s work on the guitar is, Alex Van Halen’s work on the drums is very impressive. The original line up of Van Halen was really something special.
Greyson’s Medley wraps up with a bit of Tool’s Forty Six & 2 to shift gears, change tempo, and move into alternate timing structures because it wouldn’t be an “impossible” medley without some progressive rock elements.
Okay, back to the fourth song in the medley, Nine Inch Nails’ song March of the Pigs. The song was released in 1994 and is the apotheosis of the development of electro-industrial music. It has an extraordinarily danceable rhythm, but with punk and metal elements incorporated into an angry whole.
While electronic-industrial music predates Nitzer Ebb’s 1985 song Murderous, this song and other contemporary Nitzer Ebb songs marked a shift from the stylings of Kraftwerk and Front 242 to add something more. After the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, his fellow Joy Division band mates formed New Order, a band that combined post-punk and electronica/dance and this opened the door for a shift in the dance club scene. New Order’s first single “Ceremony” was a continuation of Joy Division’s sound, but the 1983 song “Blue Monday” marked a shift to the dance club that continued through “The Perfect Kiss” and “Bizarre Love Triangle.” All of those songs had had echoes of the post punk, but were still light hearted.
Nitzer Ebb’s Murderous predates Front 242’s Headhunter by a few years and marks a significant shift in industrial music that makes it harder, faster, and louder. It is the music of Cyberpunk. Fully electronic and fully punk.
You can see the influence of songs like Murderous on the industry when you compare Ministry’s 1983 song “Effigy” to anything they performed later. While it is undeniable, to me anyway, that the album cover for With Sympathy influenced the Vampire the Masquerade book cover, the songs on the early industrial album are more Depeche Mode than KMFDM and the transition of the band around 1985 is remarkable.
You can see the beginnings of the change in 1984’s Everyday is Halloween, where the band seems to be mocking what they perceived as the overly saccharin sounds of Depeche Mode. You can see a desire for something harder and more punk. The irony is there, but the driving anger has yet to arrive.
That anger had arrived by 1986 and Ministry’s album Twitch. It’s filled with angry songs and grinding, almost shrill, electronic notes. This is dance industrial transformed in a post Nitzer Ebb environment that’s seeking to push the ideas even further.
By 1988 Ministry had pushed the punk and metal industrial elements to the forefront of their music. The rhythms are still danceable. These are still songs meant for the clubs. Ministry had been experimenting with these elements for a long time and you can listen to their journey in the Wax Trax! compilation MinistryTrax! which suggests Nitzer Ebb wasn’t the source of their changes, rather broke down resistance to their sounds.
Ministry’s 1989 album The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste marks the moment when their combination of anger and dance began to become more mainstream. The album sold over 500,000 copies and got tons of play on alternative radio. Ministry’s 1988 album was the the early adopter album, and Twitch was the Hipster “well, ackshually” album, and The Mind was the “it’s playing at fraternity parties” album.
The same year as Ministry’s album The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, Skinny Puppy released Rabies. This album combined electronic industrial punk with heavy sampling similar to hip hop music. If you listen to Never Believe (above) and Hexonxonx and then go back to the Nine Inch Nails song, you can’t help but hear the connection between them.
It’s Play Like a Pirate Day and it’s the Spooky Season, that means it’s time to pick a movie that combines horror and pirates. Back in August, Rebekah King shared her appreciation for John Carpenter’s 1980 classic The Fog.
It’s a wonderfully eerie film where most of the characters realize they are in a horror film at some point. In most horror movies, this realization is a superpower in and of itself that will help you survive, but it doesn’t help them much because they don’t have the tools to fight what’s coming. There are some some great cameos in the film and in my head canon Jamie Lee Curtis’s character (Elizabeth Solley) is the same person as her character from Halloween. She’s just changed her name and decided to get as far away from her experience as possible.
While that’s just my head canon, I do wish that John Carpenter and Debra Hill had been able to do what they (rather than what the Studio) wanted with the Halloween franchise. As I mentioned in my Week 2 recommendation of Halloween III, their goal was to have an anthology series that told a different horror story each year. If that had been allowed than The Fog would be Halloween II and more people would recognize the brilliance of Halloween III.
Sadly, we got a series of movies based on The Shape and not the anthology series. Yes, there are several good movies about The Shape, but there are so many that any real life has been drained out of the character.
In all my years of roleplaying, I never played a dedicated pirate RPG. We did a bunch of fantasy D&D based pirate/naval campaigns, and Spelljammer, of course, but I still haven't tried a dedicated system. Need to do some reading.
Considering the way Voice media lost the Voice itself, and the LA Weekly in the end, TRV is water way under the bridge. It would never have outlasted those, even if they had managed it more smartly.