We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.
I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.
It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.
(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)
Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.
My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.
When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.
We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.
Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.
The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.
I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.
Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”
Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.
But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.
The rules of Gay Pirate Plate are simple by the way.
The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.
No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.
The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.
Every time your sibling successfully absconds with the Gay Pirate Plate, you must respond with indignant fury, as if you have not also repeatedly and blatantly stolen the Gay Pirate Plate.
Ah the nostalgia. If Windows 98 was a boss, it would glitch out and start falling apart and freezing reality around you and malfunctioning. That thing was seriously unstable. XP was the first decent operating system Microsoft made.
I had a dream that the king and the queen of a small country had a daughter. They needed a son, a first-born son, so in secret, without telling anyone of their child’s gender, they travelled to the nearby woods that were rumoured to house a witch.
They made a deal with that witch. They wanted a son, and they got one. A son, one made out of clay and wood, flexible enough to grow but sturdy enough to withstand its destined path, enchanted to look like a human child. The witch asked for only one thing, and that was for their daughter.
They left the girl readily.
The witch raised her as her own, and called her Thyme. The princess grew up unknowing of her heritage, grew up calling the witch Mama, and the witch did her very best to earn that title.
She was taught magic, and how to forage in the woods, how to build sturdy wooden structures and how to make the most delicious stews. The girl had a good life, and the witch was pleased.
The girl grew into a woman, and learned more and more powerful magics, grew stronger from hauling wood and stones and animals to cook, grew smarter as the witch taught her more.
She learned to deal with the people in the villages nearby, learned how to brew remedies and medicines and how to treat illness and injury, and learned how to tell when someone was lying.
Every time the pair went into town, the people would remark at just how similar Thyme was to her mother.
(Thyme does not know who and what she is. She does not know that she was born a princess, that she was sold. She only knows that one night after her mother read her a story about princesses and dragons, her mother had asked her if she ever wanted to be a princess.)
((Thyme only knows that she very quickly answered no. She likes being a witch, thank you very much, she likes the power that comes with it and the way that she can look at things and know their true nature.))
The witch starts preparing the ritual early, starts collecting the necessities in the winter so they can be ready by the fall equinox. Her daughter helps, and does not ask what this is for, just knows that it is important.
The witch looks at Thyme, both their hands raised into the air over a complicated array of plants, tended carefully to grow into a circle, and says, sorry.
“Imagine a woman in the long skirts and high collar of the early 20th century standing in front of the painting she created. It is a massive piece—about 10 feet tall by 8 feet wide—and it is not a landscape, a portrait, a still life, nor a scene from myth or history. Dominating the composition is a bold yellow form reminiscent of a plant or sea creature, glowing amid colorful, biomorphic shapes and vigorous lines. This is just one of 10 such works that she has created almost entirely alone—sometimes walking on her work as she lays down the paint—and one of 193 radically abstract paintings that she has made in a few short years, between 1906 and 1915. None of these details fit with the story told in museums and art history courses. We know the first abstract painters so well that we often refer to them by last names alone: Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. We know who is celebrated for doing “action painting” on giant canvases laid on the floor—Pollock. Each of these men has been lauded for opening a way into new territory. As it turns out, that territory had already been explored by another artist. Her name was Hilma af Klint.”
