Doom Pirate Flags
While the precise origin of the Doom III pirate flag is unknown, its ancestry can be traced with some certainty. They were used to intimidate the messageboard poster or leech, and the flag was designed to conjure up fear, dread, and Nine Inch Nails album covers. It was an important part of the pirate armoury, and was the pirate's best form of psychological warfare, especially considering their inability to type complete words, let alone full sentances. If a pirate could intimidate a leech into providing "good upload", then danger to the pirate clan's bandwidth limitations would be eliminated, and the victim's warez could be taken undamaged.
Here are a few examples of major Doom Pirate flags:
Eddie England - This longtime online pirate, based out of an unknown port in the United Kingdom, has been distributing cracked software since the Amiga days and was well known for making full copies of Wolfenstein 3D available in the early 90s. While all pirates have their own flag, England's "Jolly Roger" (from the french
jolie meaning jolly and
roger meaning to have sex with a woman, or at least downloading pornography about the same) has become the standard Hollywood image of piracy. Early versions of the flag featured a 5 1/4 inch diskette above the crossbones, but has evolved over the years to keep up with the latest trends in data storage.
CONDENT - This pirate nickname appears to have originated with a slight alterantion of the tech company he works for. Fortunatly, he's generally happy to just go by "Ed". His flag concept is straightforward: CONDENT is jealous that Eddie England beat him to the "Ed" punch and thus decided that three Jolly Rogers is better than just one.
Edward Hot-For-Teacher (better known as Blackbeard) - Perhaps the most famous of all Doom pirates, Edward's name comes from his side business in sending spam for porn sites, thus "Blackbeard", a reference to his pubic hair fetish. Several recurring Doom pirate symbols are in use here, namely the red disc (representing an upgrade to DVD-R instead of mere CD-R), the Doom Skull skeleton, and a spear. To be honest, we're not sure what the spear is supposed to mean, but it sure does show up an awful lot.
John R.A.C. Ham (aka cAlIcO jAcK) - Here's another varation of the Jolly Roger, this time from a fantasy role-playing and MUD enthusiast who got their start online first with alt.fan.warlord and later rec.arts.comics, where they were devout fans of DC's line of licensed AD&D comic books. (And "Ham" presumably refers to ham radio, though no one is quite sure what that has to do with the swords.) Lately, R.A.C. Ham has gone by "cAlIcO jAcK, thus throwing their gender into question; while they've always claimed to be male, a name like "calico" is obviously feminine, or at least teh ghey.
Henry Everly - With a nick inspired by his incessent oldies music references, Everly stole Hot-For-Teacher's Doom Skull image and merged it with the Jolly Roger. He's been known to fly the flag both in the traditional black and white colors, but also in the blood red and white colors, which would probably inspire fear in his enemies if he wasn't quoting lyrics from "Bye Bye Love".
Bartholomew "Black Power Bart" Simpson - "Black Bart" (who idolizes Matt Groening and Huey Newton) has a particulary distinctive flag, known alternately as the "Roller Disco" or "Log-Rolling" flag. Bart is proud of his FTP connections, and is thus shown standing over the inferior methods of Internet Relay Chat and BitTorrent. Note the use of a font from the pirate literary classic "The Matrix".
Blue Bonnet - No explanation necessary.
John "the Squelch" Quelch - Finally, well know horror movie fiend Quelch ripped off Hot-For-Teacher, with two minor modifications. First, the mysterious spear imagery is actually penetrating the DVD-R for, as he puts it, "extra gore". Second, the hourglass is more prominent in Quelch's flag, which has two meanings: Quelch is bragging that he'll be distributing Doom3 as "zero-day warez" and he also spends a lot of time bitching about how long it's taking to actually release the damn game in the first place.
FnordChan
