#Aboard the Titanic

[weaponizedducks]

happy proving mr birling wrong day! (anniversary of the titanic sinking) and also kate winslet and leo di caprio

[adm-starblitzsteel-4305]

Guys, we have a biggest problem.

The MF is on its way to fear before us.

[ambeauty]

I need them to kiss again before Part 1 ends.

[goldpilot22]

had another one of those dreams where I meet someone and it makes me maybe realize smth about myself because that something was already clearly there in the dream

[teatime6519]

I get so jealous of people reacting to AoT for the first time 😭😭

[bumblingbabooshka]

I know I’ve probably shared this before but it’s too cute not to - I mean...yes, yes absolutely. He would. 

[soft-stoner-babe]

just wanna cuddle up with someone high as a kite and talk about obscure factoids about the sinking of the titanic while we slowly and sensually knead eachother’s bellies

[chaoticgoodcaptain]

yk i think it's really funny to watch all the people around here mentioning the ship full of refugees now when we have the oceangate, but damn where were you before, why was not the refugee ship in trends a week ago huh

like you say people are hypocritical when not paying attention to the refugee ship, but where were you then...were you that vocal about it as you are now?

[morosoro]

Man, it’s such a struggle to remember I’m supposed to be a completely different person offline than I am online nowadays.

I have an old friend I’ve known since childhood that I’m seeing more and more of recently after we went through the pandemic without talking much and every time I talk to her now I feel like an imposter trying so hard to be normal.

Like omg she doesn’t know I have a Tumblr where I thirst after a 61 year old man day in and day out! She doesn’t know I spend most of my free time talking with people on the internet about the blorbos from my show, theorizing and creating weird head cannons. She doesn’t know I write older lizard-wizard/younger maid double-dick porn! (Still working on that btw, just hit a block I’m struggling to get past, but I’ll get there)

What do normal people talk about again?! It’s been so long! I don’t want to scare her away…

[michaelwatt]

my feral brain thought of the idea of a titanic angelbutter au and i hate how far my brain was willing to develop it

[tortoisesshells]

write another au, they said. it’ll be fun, they said.

[cabbagewithissues]

Can’t believe I haven’t seen anything on here about the rich-people-tourism submarine (steered by a video game controller???) that went missing on the way to the Titanic ruins.

This seems like the kind of story this site usually latches onto

UPDATE/EDIT (I put this in a reblog as well but just so ppl see it): it seems like it was possibly carrying researchers/explorers as well? I haven’t seen a manifest yet, but either way, I feel awful for the passengers/crew and their families, this has got to be harrowing for them

June 22, 2023, 2:50pm EST Update: OceanGate released a statement saying they believe those aboard the Titan submersible “have been sadly lost.” According to the US Coast Guard press conference at 3pm EST, the debris found is “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[secretmellowblog]

On the subject of the Titanic ‘submersible’ that was lost in the deep with all its wealthy tourists— it’s so insane/eerie in hindsight to read this article from the Smithsonian that interviews the CEO Stockton Rush long before the disaster.

Despite the Smithsonian supposedly being an organization that cares about science and truth, and the fact that there were SO MANY obvious red flags from the beginning and so many people criticizing the company…..the article is a puff piece uncritically glorifying the CEO’s obviously terrible submersible project. It compares him in glowing terms to Elon Musk. It is an article about how private ventures like those of Stockton Rush and Elon Musk can and should be the future of the world.

We’ve obviously learned now that there were whistleblowers at the company who were warning for a long time that Stockton Rush’s submersible was unsafe— only to be fired and then sued. It makes sense the submersible was so unsafe, because the CEO in this interview is open about how he has no background in underwater engineering and is annoyed by quote “regulations that needlessly prioritize passenger safety.”

Soon after, the private [submersible] market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

The fact that Stockton Rush (who was piloting the submarine when the disaster happened) is on record complaining about the evils of regulations that prioritize people’s safety, and the Smithsonian uncritically regurgitated that rhetoric in their glowing puff piece about how rich tycoons like Elon Musk and Stockton Rush are going to save the world is just…..in hindsight of how everything ended it’s just so much horrible black comedy? It’s like a satire about the dangers of uncritically worshipping the rich.

It is mentioned in the article that Rush chose to make his submersible in a different shape, and with a different (cheaper) material than is usually used for submersibles. The article frames this as a result of daring innovation, and not of negligence/ignorance. This passage in particular, which in context is supposed to portray Rush’s critics as joyless naysayers who were proven wrong by the noble tycoon, is pretty foreboding in hindsight:

Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.”

And then!!

The exact problem that happened to Titan this weekend, happened on Titan’s very first test voyage to the Titanic! The experimental carbon fiber hull had an issue and it caused communications to break down!

The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”

Both Rush and the article writer treat this as a fun quirky story, instead of a serious safety failure and red flag with his experimental macgyvered regulation-flaunting submersible.

Other highlights from the article include:

Stockton rush saying that if 3/4 of the planet is water, why haven’t we monetized it?

Stockton saying we will “colonize the ocean long before we colonize space”

Lots of weird pro colonialism stuff in general??? This article loves colonialism and thinks it’s cool

Rush saying he plans for this to eventually help find more underwater resources for the US to exploit and profit from

Elon musk comparisons. The article writer does not mention that Elon Musk’s rockets explode and therefore it would be a bad idea to get in one of them, because that would imply it’s a bad idea to get into the submersible

Stockton rush seeing himself as Captain Kirk

The article writer comparing the tourists who plan to join Rush to Englishmen who went on colonialist journeys to Africa as if that’s like, a good thing. So much pro colonialism stuff in this article

So many sentences about Stockton Rush being handsome when he literally just looks like some guy

The article beginning with an editor’s note from years later disclaiming that the extraordinary submersible they’re advertising in this article is uh. It’s now uhhhh

But yeah it really does just bring home how so many organizations that supposedly care about scientific truth or journalistic integrity are willing to uncritically platform propaganda for wealthy CEOS. It’s frustrating how easily people fall for the fake myths that careless wealthy people invent for themselves, and even more frustrating that supposedly respectable institutions will platform irresponsible lies that end up getting people killed.

Rush is such an obvious and simple example of this, and his negligence is “only” killing five people including himself. But to me it feels like a cautionary tale to bear in mind when it comes to uncritical puff piece media coverage of similar “daring tycoon innovations” by people like Bezos or Musk.

[shane-west]

APRIL 15TH 1912 - TITANIC SINKS

Captain Smith demands that an emergency request for assistance be broadcast to all ships within range. However the nearest ship, the Californian, has turned off her wireless for the evening after receiving Phillips’ curt response earlier in the evening. Tragically, the ship was a mere 20 miles away and could have reached Titanic before she sank. Captain Smith gives the order to start loading the lifeboats on the Titanic, women and children first. 

At 12.45am the first lifeboat is launched. She leaves with just 28 of a possible 65 people on board. The first of eight emergency distress rockets is fired. At 2.20am Titanic slips beneath the surface of the water. At 8.30am The last of the lifeboats is rescued by the Carpathia. The Californian arrives at the scene and navigates the disaster area looking for survivors. The Carpathia sets sail for New York, with 705 survivors aboard. In total around 1,522 victims are believed lost at sea. Aboard Carpathia, Bruce Ismay sends a telegram to the White Star Line’s New York office - it read "Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision with iceberg, resulting in serious loss of life. Full particulars later."

More than 1,500 people died during the sinking of the Titanic. Of the ship's crew members, approximately 700 died. Another high fatality rate was among third class passengers. Of approximately 710 passengers in third class, around 174 people survived.

[spacefrontier]

Voyager 2 begins its journey through the cosmos aboard a Titan III-Centaur, August 20, 1977.

Voyager 2's primary mission was the study of planets in the outer solar system. It completed this mission in 1989, having flown by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Following the primary mission, Voyager 2 began its extended mission to study the interstellar medium, which it entered in November of 2018.

View of Neptunian clouds, taken by Voyager 2 prior to its closest approach to the planet

NASA 1, 2