Om nom nom delicious democracy.

So for...rather obvious reasons, I've been reading up on pirates lately. It's rather interesting stuff, although finding information on Life At Sea, ship anatomy and the organization of duties in locally available book form has been a bit troublesome.

One of the complaints I've seen about modern pirate fiction is that it tends to ignore the seagoing mugger/rapist/murderer aspect in favor of the sword-swinging buccaneer of the Disney version. And while it's true that pirates were not the nicest of people, the complaints seems to ignore the fact that everyone else puttering about on the sea at that point in time was also a complete bastard to everyone else. More so, in the case of your average underfed, overworked, and generally oppressed naval crews.

And now I'm going to write stuff down because my head hurts from too much informations.