#like. polar expeditions I understand

[mycological-mariner]

Wa-hey, just found out I share the same birthday as ill-fated explorer Percy Fawcett

[frmulcahy]

Listening to an episode of the @antiquesfreaks podcast where they cover the costuming in The Terror and here are some amazing moments:

"But Ken, are you the only one of us that put themselves through reading the book?" "I did. Because John Bridgens was trapped inside and I had to get him out and if I read the book good enough, perhaps I could save him"

"If you don't tell these men what to wear, they're gonna look like straight up hoochies."

"As we see in the later episodes of The Terror and discipline does break down and Dundy just starts showing up to command meetings with his suspenders out! Slattern that he is!!!

"Victorian Navy: one to one analog to working at present day Target."

"I heard they flog you at Target."

"I was press ganged into working at Target."

"It's Victorian times. Everyone's wicked fucking repressed and they're about to get wicked un-repressed whether they like it or not, and they're going to show that through their clothing."

"a blur of muttonchops"

"I pre-gamed the show for 5 years with gifsets on tumblr to makes sure I would be able to tell at least the major speaking roles apart, and I still could not tell Little and Jopson apart until I figured out they had different eye colors."

"And now I'm Pilkington SpottingTM as a hobby"

calling JFJ a "fashionable boy" with his "nippies out" because he doesn't button up his coat all the way like Franklin and Crozier

The two regular hosts repeatedly comparing themselves to a delinquent class that their guest is stuck substitute teaching

"I think my character would be hitting a fat doobie right about now"

Discussing Jared Harris being obsessed with his own costuming details like all the mending on Crozier's clothes

Jopson's first appearance - "he's normal and they're normal and everyone's having a normal time here on this completely routine expedition." "It's so normal. Do you ever fall in love with your boss???" "It couldn't have been more erotic if they had just had gay sex."

Stanley and McDonald's button grouping on their uniforms to denote rank

THEY TALK ABOUT THE ICONIC JFJ GANSEEEYYY

Also Irving's Sanquhar scarf :')

"the red sweater of tenderness" sobbing screaming throwing up

"I think The Terror would have been improved if all of the marines had Boston accents for no reason"

Also marines vs normal sailors

comparing sailor's clothes to fast fashion because it's not very tailored lmaooo

The canvas overcoats being period inaccurate but still neat because they're referencing later polar expeditions like what we see on the guys in the Shackleton expedition etc

They talk about irl Goodsir's letter about clothes and the many many shirts!

Nive having to wear a cooling vest under her costume since it was real caribou fur and her coat being patched with sail cloth later.

They go into Yup'ik masks which is super cool! As well as have a conversation about the ethics of visuals/information/knowledge about indigenous artwork being shared with folks outside of those communities.

Repeated! Dan! Simmons! Roasting! As! They! Should!!!!!

Reapted! Nive! Nielsen! Praising! As! They! Should!!!!!!!!

Sophia's "oceanic color theme"

"They let the dresses have colors. The dresses have colors. The dresses have bright beautiful colors, and it's great."

"They had invented aniline dyes and they were about to make it everybody's problem!"

Lady Jane in more solids vs Sophia in more patterns

"'A woman could never possibly understand polar exploration' meanwhil Silna's up there doing it better than all of them."

Clowning on how other period pieces never use bonnets and always fuck up in the hair and makeup department

"I found Harry Goodsir's fursuit btw"

"On a scale of Calypso's Birthday to Fitzjames's Carnivale, how's your impromptu nautical drag ball going?"

"It's actually exactly like The Purge." "It's like a little Victorian maritime Purge."

"As far as metaphor and literary analysis and whatever, scurvy understood the fucking assignment."

"I punched in Scorbutic Nostalgia so that I could remember to read about it later." "I have some literature for you if you want." "Yeah fantastic! I love disease"

"CGI bear expensive"

"This episode comes with a heavy caveat of 'go to Terror Camp'" amazing.

THE DRESSTM

Tozer's Hotspur costume and Dundy's Henry VI costume and their relevance

"This is the last we see of Party!Dundy"

(About Little) "Every day he gets emails :("

Bridgler and Apollo/Hyacinthus stuff fuuuuuccckk

"Hodgepodge, my boy"

"Oompa loompa doompity dacticals, don't indulge your morals over your practicals"

"Rip Hickey you would've loved Joker"

Not a silly quote but just a really fantastic one: "That is what the best historical designers do, is they find these nuggets of information that allow them to tell a story with authenticity, both in a way that is historical but authentic to the characters as well." EXAAAACCCTTTLLLYYYYYY

"Whomst among us has not Joplarped to get through the workday?"

[qqueenofhades]

top ten non-fiction (general) books and top ten history books?

Naturally, whenever I volunteer to talk about books, I completely forget everything I have ever read, but we'll try to overcome this. Since it is impossible for me to pick them from all-time, I'll do this list from what I have recently read and enjoyed, including both nonfiction and history specifically since most of these fit that bill somehow:

Society of the Snow by Pablo Vierci. Just finished this last night, and it's the source material for the Netflix film of the same name, of the 1972 plane crash of an Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes and their incredible survival odyssey. If you've seen the film, you know how harrowing and also incredibly moving it is.

Pretty much anything by David Grann, including The Wager, Killers of the Flower Moon, Lost City of Z, etc. The Wager is his newest one, though people may have heard of Killers of the Flower Moon, but they're all good. He's up there with Erik Larson as one of my favorite writers of utterly gripping and novelistic nonfiction.

Speaking of Erik Larson: pretty much anything by, including Dead Wake, The Splendid and the Vile, In the Garden of Beasts, etc. Most people will have heard of and/or read Devil in the White City, but his other stuff is equally good. His newest, The Demon of Unrest, is a bit slower than some of the others IMHO, but it's also about the beginning of the Civil War and the crisis at Fort Sumter and is important reading in our current perilous moment.

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham. A forensic and incredibly detailed history of the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, by Anthony Bale. This is an entertaining and readable introduction to mobility in the Middle Ages: who traveled, where they went, what they thought, and how they reacted and wrote about the other cultures they encountered, from both east and west. Definitely a good entry point for the layman who has heard the "medieval people never traveled/went anywhere" stereotype and knows it's wrong, but wants to know more HOW.

Into the Silence: Mallory, the Great War, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. Another incredibly detailed doorstopper history book that reads like a novel, exploring 19th-century British imperialism in Asia, the race to climb Mount Everest, the Great War, and more.

Emperor of Rome and SPQR by Mary Beard. These are both incredibly accessible starting points for studying Rome, written by a renowned classicist with a knack for making her historical material and concepts easy to understand and entertaining. Don't be put off by the length of either of these, as they read easily.

The Wide Wide Sea and The Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides. The former is his newest book, about the last voyage of Captain Cook, and the latter is my favorite of his other books, about the 19th-century USS Jeannette polar expedition. He is a writer of incredible skill, thoughtfulness, and detail in handling subjects of empire, exploration, colonialism, maritime history, and adventure.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Raddon O'Keefe. A compelling, disturbing, mesmerizing, and infuriating account of the Sackler family, the creation of OxyContin, and the opioid epidemic in America.

Master Slave Husband Wife, by Ilyon Woo. Now, this one is a bit cheating since I haven't actually read it yet (it's on hold at the library), but it's won the Pulitzer Prize for history so I'm fairly sure it's going to be good. It's about 19th century slaves-turned-abolitionists William and Ellen Craft and their race- and gender-bending journey to freedom and anti-slavery activism.

[bixbythemartian]

This is About Oceangate

...kind of. Like, heads up for people who are sick of hearing about it or are too disturbed by this, just scoot on by, that's fine.

Like everybody else my age who had a middle school special interest in the Titanic that was further fueled by the James Cameron movie (and that sounds very specific, but I absolutely know I'm not alone), I've been following this story fuckin voraciously.

I think everybody I know IRL and online is fucking sick of me talking about it. I have been actively trying not to blog much about it here because I'm so obsessed with it that I'm annoyed with myself. I would like to not be this interested in it.

But a lot of the stuff I can think of to say has been said by a lot of people already, I don't want to add to an already noisy environment if I've got nothing new to say.

So, instead, I want to talk about what I haven't seen very many people talking about- something that's stood out to me about the way the media has been handling this story from the get-go. So, finally, I'm inflicting my days long media binge on you.

The media's handling of this was bad. Like, comprehensively fucked.

For the uninformed, a primer on the situation- feel free to skip down if you know all this, there's a bulleted list right after I get done with this part, look for that. But some of this is important to the terms I use, so I wanted to lay it out. (Also I just want to get a lot of this out of my system, please just let me have this.)

The Titan is a 'cyclops-class' submersible. As far as I can tell, 'cyclops-class' is unique to the people who made this submersible, it's not a widely recognized thing.

The Titan can carry up to five passengers. It was supposed to be rated to reach depths of up to 4000 meters below sea level.

The Titan is/was owned and operated by a company known as Oceangate. There's a lot of questions regarding the safety of the submersible, where the math came from on their depth rating, and- basically everything about the Titan is in question, at this point. There's a lot of questions, but that's not what I want to talk about.

Right now. Maybe later.

A submersible is distinct from a submarine in that it requires a surface support ship for many things- the Titan moved too slow to leave port under its own power and go to the site, it didn't have enough life support to do that kind of thing, etc. A submarine is self-supporting and can operate independently. Kind of pedantic, I know, but the Titan is a submersible, not a submarine.

The Titan had a planned expedition to the wreck of the Titanic on June 18, 2023- this past Sunday, at the time of writing. The expedition was supposed to last around 10 hours. It chartered a ship- the Polar Prince- to act as mother ship, the on the surface support that the Titan requires. (The Polar Prince is owned and operated by a different company than the Titan.)

1 hour and 45 minutes into the expedition, as the Titan was still making its way to the sea floor, the Polar Prince lost all contact with the submersible.

The Titanic wreck is at just under 4000 meters deep, right around 2.5 miles.

Now, my understanding is that the Titan was not fully at the ocean floor at the point contact was lost, but it's not clear how deep the Titan was at that time. We may not ever know this for certain.

When the Titan was reported as missing to the coast guard is kind of unclear, to me- I heard 6 hours after they lost contact, I heard 12 hours after they lost contact, I saw something that indicated they reported it missing immediately- I don't know for sure. When the coast guard report comes out, I'm hoping we'll get a more accurate timeline.

However, as soon as it was reported missing, a massive search and rescue operationg was started. Complicating the search efforts were the fact that the submersible seemed to have no type of emergency distress locator beacon (I'm not sure what the precise nautical terminology would be for this).

The search included visual searching of the surface, dropping buoys with microphones, and ROVs (unmanned remote operated vehicles, deep sea robots operated by crew on ships at the surface) searching the floor, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Deep sea radar etc etc, every tool they had access to.

The search and rescue concluded on Thursday (June 22, 2023) around midday, when they definitively found pieces of the destroyed submersible's pressure vessel (the part of the submersible that held pressure and kept the people safe and alive) in a debris field, approximately 1600 feet away from the Titanic.

The destroyed pressure vessel and reports from the Navy on hearing sounds consistent with implosion at the time the Titan lost contact indicates that the submersible underwent what is being called a 'catastrophic implosion'.

It is now an investigation and recovery operation, while they try to figure out what exactly went wrong.

The five men in the sub are dead. In all likelihood, they died so quickly that their nervous system didn't have time to process what happened. What happened to their bodies during this was probably gory and kind of horrifying, but it's unlikely they experienced any awareness of this.

There were five extremely wealthy men on the submersible- they were not all billionaires, but those that weren't were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If you want a rough sketch of their biographies, there's a link here. Other than them being pretty wealthy, who they are doesn't play that much into what I want to talk about, so I don't feel the need to go into it right now. (Again, as more information comes out, I may come back for another swing.)

So, my complaint. The number of times I saw a news interview with an expert that went like this is not small:

news host interviews deep ocean expert of some variety (who is not involved in rescue)

host asks expert what chances are that the dudes are alive and will be recovered alive

expert, being honest, says something like 'slim to none'

host responds with some amount of sincere-seeming disappointment, then after interview, pivots to the ongoing search for the definitely still alive people

There were news programs with clocks counting down how much theoretical oxygen was left. There were frequent updates to news stories with nothingburgers of additions, just to pad it out. It was, if they were alive at that moment, fucking ghoulish. That they were dead makes it even more horrible.

And I cannot emphasize enough how many experts said, to generalize and paraphrase here: "Unless they are found bobbing on the surface in the next n hours, they are dead. Even if they are alive right this minute, on the bottom of the ocean, there is no hope to rescue them in time."

This is not a failure of any of the rescue entities involved, by the way. The environment they were presumed to be in- 4000 meters under sea level- is so extreme that there are very few vehicles in the world with the capability of even getting to that depth. Like, 10 or less. As far as I know, none of them are designed to do any kind of deep sea rescue- which would have involved carefully scooping up or netting the Titan and hauling it up very slowly. There's no way to transfer personnel between ships at this depth, and the Titan had the largest passenger allowance at this depth, afaik. Like, the odds were incredibly, vanishingly small that these men would live.

The media, at large, never ever really allowed that to change the way they talked about this story or treated the participants in the story. At around 11 am or noon (central daylight time) on Thursday I saw them talking about how 'oxygen is critical'.

Oxygen was critical 24 hours prior. Even by the most generous of expectations, they were out of breathable air. Given how, to put it mildly, janky the submersible seemed to have been, there was absolutely no guarantee that they had even the 96 hours that Oceangate claimed.

Their likelihood of being rescued alive from the ocean floor was minimal on Monday. By Thursday, they were dead- again, unless they were found on the surface somewhere and had managed to carefully preserve their air somehow, they were already dead.

The media didn't really allow for the reality of the situation to be clear until Oceangate and the USCG came out and said 'yeah, they're dead'.

"Well, what's the problem with that?" you might ask. "The United States Coast Guard was the one who was saying it was a rescue up until that point."

Sure. That's their job. Their job is to treat it like an urgent rescue until it is certain that it is not. A significant amount of what they do is to rescue people from doing damnfool things in the water, and keeping hope alive until they find bodies, or evidence thereof. They were doing exactly what they should be doing.

(Whether they do this to this extent for everybody lost at sea is another conversation that's absolutely worth having, as well as their role in border patrol, but I have no bone to pick with the USCG in this particular instance. They did their all until they could do no more, that's the whole point of them, this is how they're supposed to operate.)

The media was not doing what they should be doing. There's an old quote somewhere that I think is just a journalism truism (everyone I've heard talk about it says their journalism professor said it)- if someone tells you it's raining, and someone else tells you it's not, your job isn't to report that, your job is to go outside and see if it's wet.

James Cameron- director of the aforementioned Titanic movie, as well as being a Titanic and deep sea submersible expert, knew they were dead on Monday.

He reached out to some people, he found out that the mother ship lost contact with the crew as well as their location at the same instant, and that the Navy heard a sound consistent with an implosion at around that time.

The information that the Navy heard the implosion was not classified information- they heard it via a listening system that was declassified in the 90s, I believe. Like, I knew about the system just kind of casually because I know random Navy stuff. (My dad was in the Navy, it's mostly osmosis.)

The people on the scene were informed as soon as the Navy knew. (When that was, I'm not sure, except it was before Monday. Probably they had someone go back and listen to it and weren't actively monitoring it, but it's hard to say.)

The deep ocean submersible community knew, well enough that James Cameron could call a buddy and find out. He was telling people on Monday to raise a glass to them.

The media could have had this information, if they did not have it. Either they didn't want to know, or did know, and didn't say it. And I can't say for certain they were suppressing information, but I do know that they frequently downplayed any evidence that these people were dead.

I know on CNN they ran a story about FADOSS- the FlyAway Deep Ocean Salvage System- that was shipped out to Newfoundland. It arrived Wednesday afternoon. Description in the alt text, link here.

At the time this story was published, the people in the sub would have theoretically had less than 24 hours of breathable air. They hadn't even chartered a ship for the FADOSS, at this point. And the port in Newfoundland is hundreds of miles from the site. I'm not sure how many hours away but, like, hours away. I think I heard it's a 6 hour trip, but I'm not certain on that.

This system was referenced in the news as if it was going to be part of the rescue process. Very clearly, this was never going to happen. The quote, 'a process which can take a full day' is a mild understatement, here.

It could, theoretically, be done in 24 hours, but was much more likely to take longer, unless they had enough crew in Newfoundland to do round-the-clock welding.

The response to the question about recovering someone alive is a polite way of saying 'that's not what we do'. They were not part of the rescue operation and were never intended to be, as far as I can tell.

(If you're wondering what part the FADOSS is going to take in the recovery and investigation process, it's not. It's used to lift heavy objects off the floor, and the Titan broke into small enough pieces that the ROVs are believed capable of handling it. FADOSS is on its way back to wherever it is kept. I suspect it was brought out in the edge case that the submersible was found intact with dead crew, to retrieve the vessel whole, so that the families would have bodies to bury.)

Setting aside the 'oh they definitely blew up' news that seems to have been available the whole time, every single piece of evidence and expertise pointed to these people being dead, and yet the news persisted in sort of breathlessly (sorry) talking about the rescue efforts and how much time was left. They persisted in talking about how definitely still alive these people were until they could not do that anymore.

Other examples of this issue are the knocking thing. There were reports of some of the buoys picking up something that could be described as 'knocking'. Some said it was 'every thirty minutes' but we don't know how precise a measurement that was. As soon as they started talking about the knocking, I looked into it.

As it turns out, this is just a thing that happens. The sea is very noisy, and it's hard to determine the source of a sound. Some geological things sound manmade, vice versa. They had a lot of ships cooperating together to work the search area, it's possible that they were hearing noise from those, or something from an oil platform a jillion miles away, because noise travels far and is hard to pinpoint. They had this issue while searching for the sunken USS Thresher and it was one of the ships doing the searching. Given how many different moving parts there were in this search operation, it's hard to say what the knocking was. This is just a thing in the ocean, there's a lot of fuckin noise and experts can't always pinpoint it down in location or even what it might be.

This is why, even though they heard sounds that were consistent with implosion, at the time that the Titan lost total contact with the mother ship, it was still treated as if there was a live rescue operation. Because they couldn't be certain.

But the odds were extremely poor that these men were alive, and almost everybody involved knew that fairly early on. Again, the rescue operation had to go forward like they were looking for someone alive because that's how that works. The media, on the other hand, handled this in a very irresponsible way.

And, like, I know, news media is bad at being news is not some like hot new thing, I've just been building up frustration for days and so it had to come out somehow.

I'm not sure how much of this was just because they're very wealthy men- only one of whom I've ever heard of before- and how much of it was because it was a very bizarre and unique ongoing situation, how much of it was the intersection of that.

But pretty much everybody with enough knowledge to be worth talking to about this knew, like, Monday that even if they weren't dead right then, they were very unlikely to make it out alive, and watching the news wind a bunch of people up over the hopeful outcome was revolting.

Okay. We'll see if I can go 24 hours without talking about this. If you made it to the end of this absolute fucking novel, congratulations and/or I'm sorry.

[areyougonnabe]

for the polar history recap posts, i’m dying to know more about lillie…deeply tragic and i’ve also heard something about the nickname ‘ooze’ and i desperately need to know more about that

LILLIE 😭😭😭😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

denis (also spelled dennis) gascoigne lillie was born in 1884, making him 26 when the terra nova set off for antarctica. he was trained in natural sciences at cambridge (although he didn't do too well on his exams) and was appointed as the ship's biologist—meaning he did not form part of the shore party in the hut in at cape evans, but remained on board the ship during the winter, studying antarctic marine biology including whales, plankton, and deep-sea creatures like sponges (like the one pictured above). his nickname "ooze" comes from his job as biologist—ooze refers to a specific kind of biological marine sediment that got pulled up in seabed dredges which lillie would then examine.

in silas's diary on the voyage south, he describes lillie:

Lilley—"Hercules'" or "Sequins" is rather a dreamer and asserts he can remember his former existences in this world. Much fun can be got from him if handled properly.

lillie was noted by other members of the expedition to be a bit of a crackpot, asserting that he was a persian and a roman in his past lives. and more than that, possibly:

Lillie had decided that he was not the marrying type, claiming that he had evolved beyond it. In later years Scott’s young Norwegian skiing expert Tryggve Gran recounted that as they crossed the Equator on the Terra Nova Lillie had revealed that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. ‘When I see a naked man I blush,’ he allegedly said as the others sprawled shirtless on the deck in tropical sunshine, ‘I am split and I can’t help it. Luckily I understand myself and have the control to avoid doing anything wrong.’ Gran was a notoriously unreliable source, and it is hard to imagine anyone having the courage to say that under those circumstances; but perhaps Lillie did.

(from sara wheeler's cherry)

usually i would not recommend anyone trust anything that comes out of gran's mouth, but honestly i do buy this, because, well... vibes.

anyway, on the terra nova, lillie was notable for his talent at caricature, and several of his rather hilariously cruel drawings appeared (copied by wilson) in the south polar times, including this one of birdie:

while the shore party was in antarctica, lillie spent two winters in new zealand studying whales, fossils, and anthropology:

Lillie has been fossilizing & is off next month for 5 months whaling with the Norwegians. He is looking very well & very happy and is ‘a dear little chap’ to use Scott’s expression.

—pennell's diary, may 18 1911

after returning to england, taking the long way round on board the terra nova to continue his marine research, lillie took up residence at cambridge again, alongside deb, silas, priestley, and griff, to work up the scientific results from the expedition.

lillie also spent a lot of time with atch and pennell in 1913, frequently accompanying them to dine and see theater in london. he also drew (probably on board the ship) the caricature of them as the "antarctic lovebirds":

during the war, he was a conscientious objector—a "conchie," refusing to go to the front. it was an incredibly difficult position to maintain in the face of widespread societal opposition. he found solace in a continued and deepening relationship with cherry (who was also not at the front, though in his case for health reasons) as sara wheeler describes in her biography of cherry:

Currently working as a bacteriologist for the military, Lillie had been one of the few visitors at Lamer during the bad months in the middle of 1916. They became unusually intimate (‘I should love to see your chubby cheeks again’), and after one weekend Lillie scrawled with typical irreverence in his note of thanks that, ‘It was only my body which left you, for my ultimate Reality still walks behind your Bath chair and meditates about the many paths of your lovely garden. With love.’

and god i just need to copy these entire sections from the wheeler in here because they make me want to sob:

In September 1916 he had been transferred to the pathology lab of a military hospital in Bournemouth, which he loathed (‘no nice cliffs or sea birds, only sand banks and orange peel’), and was appalled to learn the next year that Cherry was poised to become engaged to Christine Davis (‘being unconventional and as near to nature as I can get, it seems all wrong to me that you should have to tie yourself up for the sake of Society’), but he strove, generally, to be optimistic, whereas Cherry was permanently resigned to his destiny. In August 1917 Lillie returned to Lamer for a week. Writing in advance with details of his train to Hatfield, he concluded that, ‘if a motor does not turn up the wings of joy will waft me those four-and-a-half miles bag included. So don’t worry.’ They had a wonderful time together. ‘I do hope,’ Lillie wrote when he was back in horrible Bournemouth, ‘your throat and the rest of you continues to get well and worthy of the sunny spirit which I see under the label ACG.'

though things seemed to be going as well as they could for lillie, shortly before the end of the war in early 1918, he suffered a nervous breakdown and landed in the notorious bethlem mental institution, known as bedlam. he was there for three years, and cherry was barred from visiting him.

he emerged for a short period of time in 1921, seemingly recovered, and took up lecturing in biology again at cambridge, but by the end of that year had relapsed and was institutionalized again.

frank debenham, writing to expedition agent j.j. kinsey in 1927 to solicit funding for SPRI, gave him an update:

Poor old Lillie is in less happy circumstances, the last I heard of him was that he was never likely to get out of Bedlam, a rather ghastly end up for poor old "Ooze's" brilliant promise.

lillie spent the rest of his life in institutions, and lived until the age of 78, dying in 1963. that was four years after the death of his friend cherry—who, despite constant attempts, was never allowed to visit him.

per UK law, lillie's medical records will be sealed until 2063, 100 years after his death, but a post on bethlem's official blog about lillie briefly notes that he was "depressed, delusional and suicidal."

the post also notes, importantly, that his breakdown had nothing whatsoever to do with his antarctic experiences:

The content of his medical notes suggests that the state of mind that brought him to hospital was entirely unrelated to his experiences of 1910-1913. Indeed, they report that “on the whole he felt better during this time”. 

OK, let's end on a nice note. here's a picture of him having a nice time at silas's wedding (i think) with his best friends. RIP lillie, i hope your next life is going well somewhere out there right now 🥲💓

(also another good writeup on lillie with some lovely art can be found on @worstjourney's patreon here!)

[madqueenalanna]

so i'm almost done with my "terror" (show) rewatch and just finished reading "terror" (book) yesterday so let me ramble lowkey about the differences

i do love of course the little character details of the book that couldn't possibly make it into the show. sir john's devotion to his "gentleman" status to the point that he stays dead silent during sex, for one, crozier getting jacked off in a pond for another. the book's meandering pace gave us lots of ship descriptions (agonizing) but also lots of time with even minor characters (peglar for one)

and so because of their respective mediums, i like each ending/portrayal of tuunbaq in its own way. in the book, it's a spirit created by a goddess, forced to wander the frozen north and feast. silna and people like her are psychic, marry other psychics to create their own tribe, their own people. this is not to control tuunbaq but simply to communicate; they leave it offerings, it doesn't kill them. the white men have no way to understand this, and so they trespass and are murdered. crozier leaves his identity behind to join these people, loses his tongue, has children by silna, and feels the honor in this choice. tuunbaq's appearance is ephemeral, difficult to explain, almost incorporeal. it isn't a monster, it's a part of the land in the same way winter is. very spiritual

in the show of course it's much more straightforward. it's a beast that can be injured, can eventually be killed, needs to be bound to a shaman that can control it. silna cuts out her own tongue to follow in her father's footsteps, instead of having lost her tongue as a child in this psychic group. it dies, agonizingly, like so many of the polar bears it resembles, yet another victim of british colonialism. silna is ostracized by her people for its death under her watch. crozier joins the netsilik without her, assimilating culturally if not on this secondary spiritual plane. obviously this makes much more sense to see on screen

the other big change is of course the health of the men. sure they SAY in the show the men are failing, and we see some of them, but the book, agonizingly (good), details every mile they haul sledges, every symptom of scurvy, a few violent deaths from botulism, blanky losing first part of his foot, then half his leg, then several wooden legs break and he calls its quits when the stump is gangrenous. the book is so clear that this takes MONTHS, it feels like months, hickey's mutiny is almost a minor footnote because they were all already almost dead by the time it occurs. the cannibalism is such a last resort that they're all half-dead by that point. it's slow, it's painful, so it all makes more... sense, almost. you FEEL their pain, this slow horrific death, the STARVATION

that said i love the death of fitzjames in the show. he's got scurvy and dies of botulism in the book, but i think it's just scurvy in the show. we see his battle scars, obtained in a colonial venture to asia, re-open and suppurate. in a very real, literal way, his past has come to haunt him, to poison him. he dies on another colonial mission, weakened by his former expeditions eating him alive, destroyed by this land that wants them dead

and from researching this show/book i got linked by some very helpful redditors to some very long articles detailing inuit descriptions of finding hms terror before it sank, so i'm excited to dip into those

[mab1905]

Oh no guys

Oh no

I’m reading that play I talked about. And it’s about colonialism and climate change through the lives of a group of Inuit people and a polar bear family. And that part of it is really good. Like all that is very beautiful. But uh. The second act is meant to be about the Franklin expedition. And. This is from the dramatis personae:

Also no mention of the terror. Not a single name of any of the crewmen is real beside’s Franklin’s. And it takes place out on the ice after they have abandoned ship. Which we know for a fact Franklin was not a part of. And like. I totally understand the necessity of simplification in a play, especially when the play is not strictly about this expedition. So in that sense the fact that Franklin is there wouldn’t bother me because like, yeah if I’m an audience member who knows nothing about this it would be easier for me to understand if Franklin is at the head and not Crozier Bc it’s JF’s name on the expedition. Also within the purpose of the play, it does not matter which of them is leading it Bc the play is about how the expedition as a whole affected the local people and wildlife. So like. That part I totally get. But… you couldn’t do a five minute google search and find their real names? ITS SO EASY TO FIND THEIR NAMES. Every single crewman in the show is someone who we know the name of. The Erebus ice master, the boatswain, the mates, the stewards, and a few unnamed crew members. Those are the people in the show. You know, James Reid, Thomas Terry, Robert Sargent, Charles Des Voux, Edward Couch, Edmund Hoar, Richard Alymore, William Fowler, and John Bridgens. Or, as this play would like you to think, “Oliver Morshead” (ice master AND chief engineer ??), “Wickers” and “Bean” (a midshipman, and a mate), “Carter” (the boatswain). Also I’m sorry. Who the fuck is James Holloway. I don’t know him. Like the play-write knows enough to talk about Lady Janes leading the search to find Franklin but not enough to know the name of Franklin’s third in command?? Or any mention of Francis??? Even if it doesn’t matter to the overarching plot why is it so hard to give them their names? Especially when it seems like so much painstaking research was done for every other aspect of the play??

Edit: it just feels very weird and imbalanced compared to the rest of the play. And someone tagged talking about how it’s not about them and it’s kinda real that they should just say fuck it give these guys random names. And I understand that to an extent, considering the number of times that has been done to Inuit people in stories told by white colonizers. But, as a reader who is fascinated by not just Franklin as a topic in the play, but also the history of British colonialism, it’s affects on the Indigenous American people and landscape, and climate change on both a physical and spiritual level; when each of those topics except one feels so well researched and cared for, it pulls me out of the story when I see discrepancies that are so glaring.

[crownlessliestheking]

Hi, if you're the crownlessliestheking who made the Annihilation poster for this year's TerrorCamp, I wanted to thank you! Annihilation is my favourite book but I'd never considered the biologist's "becoming" in opposition to understanding, only as a means to it. Your (if this is you) comparison of her with Crozier and the idea that "they both choose to become rather than to understand" is going to be knocking around my head for days. If I've got the wrong person, well, nice lotr blog anyways!

Don't worry, you've got the right person! Annihilation (well...all of Southern Reach) is a favorite of mine as well – and tbh if I had more space in the poster I'd have loved to dissect different characters and parallel them to those in the Expedition (the biologist and Crozier, ofc; but also Control in Book 2 and Fitzjames, and Hickey and Lowry especially given Lowry's POV in the new book).

And yeah! The biologist is like...she changes, and in some ways this is going to give her the answers she wants, but for her entire life she's been so isolated and very different from other people, so to me in a way this is her surrendering and becoming who, in some ways, she was always meant to be. Or was always going to be, from the second she stepped into Area X. Crozier already knows there's no understanding what or why or how; he can only ever accept it and his failure, and so he just...becomes. Becomes Aglooka and casts off every bit of the man Francis Crozier once was, except for the grief.

Thank you so much and I'm so glad you liked the poster!! And for those who don't know what this is about, you can find my poster along with VERY cool other works here:

[clove-pinks]

I'm so emotional over the Franklin Expedition daguerreotypes at auction that I don't know if I can even make fun of their 1840s hairstyles, which are more visible than ever in the high resolution images (which are better than anything SPRI ever released, as Logan Zachary pointed out).

But. Edward Couch and macassar oil and/or bear's grease or whatever product he has lmao.

I have seen this in many other mid-19th century daguerreotypes: so much styling product his hair gleams and is literally sculpted into shape. (I have also previously written about Dr. Stanley's 1840s juvenile delinquent hairstyle). Along with the low inseam and footstrap on trousers, it seems to be one of those things that rarely makes it into historical costume dramas.

The Franklin daguerreotype images are also high resolution enough that you get a better view of their wonderful black stocks tied with bows. It's an easy look but the bow gives it a certain elegance—Fitzjames and Goodsir have particularly good examples of stocks. As I understand it almost any black stock was acceptable per Royal Navy regs for a long time, allowing the 19th century officer a certain degree of fashion expression changing with the times.

I love Frederick William Beechey's portrait circa 1822 in pattern 1812 uniform (NMM):

Another great polar look! (Yes Beechey like Beechey Island, which he named after his father).

[nedlittle]

just had an all-timer of a dream

okay so i'm a mermaid which in this case means i'm just a person who lives under one of those big aquarium shark tunnels at the bottom of the ocean. however i do also have mermaid powers and am specifically in charge of antarctica. so we flash back to 1914 where i am 14 or 15 and have signed up for the ENDURANCE EXPEDITION as frank hurley's assistant. in my interview w shackleton i'm like yeah i sort of have nothing to live for and i love antarctica and my family sucks then there's a flashback of me having dinner with my parents at a restaurant and being sufficiently miserable. back to 1914 and shackleton is like you have the job kid. so i do endurance stuff for a while and take a bunch of photos and then i just fucking DIE on the expedition where FAMOUSLY EVERYONE LIVES!! i think i die of exposure rip but the crew mourns me and then POSEIDON himself takes pity on me like wow this bitch loved polar exploration so much i will let them live here forever. he makes me into a mermaid and gives me domain over the antarctic ocean because i am his special little birthday boy. there are a bunch of subplots with my mermaid siblings blah blah blah domestic drama. then i go on land for some reason and in rapid succession 1) use my powers to save schoolchildren from Many polar bears 2) befriend a moose 3) get engaged to CHAPPELL ROAN who agrees to live at the bottom of the ocean with me 💕. idk how i pulled her. maybe my mermaid powers. there's a bunch of stuff about her adjusting to mermaid life and then it's time to pick out clothes for our engagement gala which we do on land for some reason. this is a mistake because we get trapped in a store and then BAM it's my old shipmates who catch us. they are understandably like why the fuck are you alive what is going on??? (i have become very famous and beloved as the only casualty of the expedition btw) chappell roan and i must explain lesbianism to a bunch of edwardian sailors which is very high stakes.

and then i woke up

[rum-inspector]

Why is my feed suddenly full of TERROR oh the tv show is on netflix YAY but what a good excuse to talk about one of my lesser known interests, polar explorations!!! And the racism that is integral part of any type of european "explorations" during the era. Or to this day too of course.

In short, The Terror TV show is a psychological horror (pretty good, I especially like the sound design it is haunting!) is based on a fictional book that is based on a real story of Franklin Expedition to finding the northwest passage (waterway through the arctic, from atlantic to pacific) in middle 19th century. They took two ship's poorly equipped for withstanding the elements, went missing and nobody really knows in detail what happened to it - other than getting defeated by the elements and the believe in the european supremacy to conquer those elements without ever bothering to ask the actual people living there for pointers (or, not trusting them when they said it can not be done, not with huge ships and heavy boats - the boats of the locals are build very different) because what do those savages know? Sentiment of europeans at the time, not mine.

When I say "Nobody knows what happened" that is a lie. Pretty sure the locals knew of the idiots with their big ships and their attitude of meeting offers of help with hostility.

Later on Amundsen achieved polar exploration with better results by actually listening and learning from the people who live there. But even he remained his racist beliefs even after everything he is known for was only made possible by the people he believed to be "inferior" - the whole idea of "exploring the unknown" or "being the first person to reach place x" is so silly when you remember people have been in many of these "uncharted places" on a regular Tuesday. And it is simply part of european supremacy (which to this day lives on unfortunately) why those people "don't count".

Now, you did not need to know any of this to enjoy the tv show which again, is fictional and great fun if you like eerie and survival - it is just extra layer of context to add to the horror - to further understand that the monster in this story is not physical.

[tailoredshirt]

I was tagged in this book meme by @lemonlyman-dotcom and @guardian-angle22 a while back, and I'm finally doing it!

Last book I…

Bought

Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger / Trials of Life by David Attenborough

I mostly borrow books from the library these days, so I only tend to buy books my library doesn't have. I'd been really wanting to listen to Apollo 13, and it was part of Libro.fm's BOGO sale. I also added Trials of Life, which is nonfiction about animal behavior.

Borrowed

The Terror by Dan Simmons (audiobook)

I’ve had the paperback for ages, but I've been reading so much by audiobook lately that I thought that might be best, since it's so long. I had to wait quite a while for it to become available, and yesterday it finally was! 🎉 I've been reading a ton about polar exploration lately in preparation. After I finish it I'll finally be able to watch the TV show!!

Was gifted

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon

I don’t get gifted books very often! Probably because I have too many already, and also because I mostly read ebooks and audiobooks. But it was on my wishlist (I tend to put poetry on my wishlists because I like reading poetry from physical books), and my mom got it for me for Christmas. Haven’t read it yet.

Gave/lent to someone

I usually give my mom a book for Christmas, but I don't remember what I got her last year. Unfortunately I don't have a ton of people in my life who read.

Started

Guard! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (audiobook)

I’ve never read any Pratchett (chorus of shocked gasps), so I decided to start with the first of the Night Watch books. It’s very fun so far!

Finished

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy (audiobook)

I've been obsessed with the history of polar exploration lately, particularly the ones that went horribly wrong somehow (sorry to this man). It's a really interesting story. I found a good map of the region online and was able to track all of the landmarks and locations they mentioned while I listened.

Didn’t finish

A Murder Was Announced by Agatha Christie (audiobook)

I’ve been reading a bunch of Agatha Christie lately, mostly Poirot novels, but this would be my first Miss Marple. I just couldn’t understand the narrator. 😩 The other books were narrated by Hugh Fraser, who I’ve enjoyed. I think this one was narrated by Emilia Fox. I cannot distinguish between British accents, but something about hers was difficult for me to understand against the ambient noise of my bus ride. Two minutes in, I noped out and returned the book (via Libby). I'll probably try it again sometime when I'm at home and can hear it better.

Gave 5 stars

11/22/63 by Stephen King (audiobook)

This gave me the worst book hangover. It’s about a guy who travels back in time to 1959(ish?) and lives in the past for a few years as he prepares to try to stop Kennedy’s assassination. It’s not actually a perfect novel, but I think I listened to it as fast as humanly possible because I was so engaged. (32 hours long!) I love time travel stories.

Gave 2 stars

A Limited Run by Karen McQuestion (audiobook)

This had a Truman Show-like setup, with actors living - in character - in a gigantic enclosed 1940s neighborhood. All of that was an immediate yes for me, but the story itself was very boring and contrived.

-

Idk who to tag for reading memes, but please consider yourself tagged if you want to do it! And tag me so I can see what you're reading.

[jesslovesboats]

whats your fav historical boat and why ??:)

Hello 🙂 I'm so glad you've asked this question and I promise to be extremely normal about it 🙂

I can find something to love in almost every polar and/or nautical expedition, but nothing has captured my attention and my heart like the Karluk, the flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition.

The ship herself was a disaster. Built in 1884 as a fishing vessel, she was repurposed as a whaler in 1892, then acquired by Stefansson in 1913 for the bargain bin price of $10,000. The Karluk was uniquely unsuited for polar exploration-- she was old, rickety, and had what chief engineer John Munro described as a "coffee pot of an engine" that was so ineffective that icebreaking was out of the question. Captain Bartlett almost refused to take her north, but in the end, he acceded to Stefansson's demands. He would come to regret this decision.

In the least surprising turn of events ever, the Karluk became trapped in the pack only a month into the voyage, hundreds of miles from her destination. She remained there until she succumbed to the pressure of the ice and sank five months later, setting the stage for one of the most unbelievable survival stories in the history of polar exploration.

Why the Karluk? For me, it's that the ship was such a perfect metaphor for the expedition itself, which is not always the case! For example-- Terra Nova was overloaded and leaked like a sieve, but the expedition she supported was meticulously planned. Endurance could not withstand the pressure of the pack, but even so, her entire crew survived. The Karluk, though? A nightmare ship with a nightmare (derogatory) leader and a nightmare (affectionate) crew for a nightmare expedition. No part of this should have worked, and it's a miracle that anyone made it home. If not for the selfless actions and basic human decency of a select few crew members and the kindness and generosity of the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, no one would ever know what happened to them.

Stefansson was simply the worst leader imaginable for a venture like this. He was smug, aloof, selfish, willing to play games with the lives of his men, and hopelessly out of his depth. He failed to adequately provision the expedition, a decision that would prove fatal. The crew he hired were a mix of polar veterans with substance abuse and/or ego problems, Indigenous people (including a family with 2 small children), untested men recruited off the docks, and inexperienced scientists not coping well with the rigors of exploration, among others. I need you to understand that these are my boys and I love them, but they were a MESS. The atmosphere on the Karluk and in the subsequent camps was a toxic sludge of fear and anger and paranoia and egos. No one here was elevated by their suffering, there was no code of honor keeping the men in line, and there were painfully few moral leaders setting examples for the others. With apologies to The Terror, survival was a nasty piece of business. To top it all off, Stefansson abandoned the Karluk and her crew after the ship became frozen in. He went on a "hunting trip" but conveniently failed to return. Leadership!

Hopefully this helps to explain why the Karluk is a perfect metaphor for this part of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Only an old, crumbling whaler with a tiny, ineffective engine could have shepherded this disaster team to the shores of Wrangel Island. The Karluk was not the ship they needed, but she was the ship they had, and even Captain Bartlett grieved as she sank.

For more information, I highly recommend checking out The Ice Master by Jennifer Niven and Empire of Ice and Stone by Buddy Levy. I also Karlukpost regularly, and you can find my screeching in the Karluk tag.

I hope this answered your question, thanks for a fun ask! ❤️

[incesthemes]

TRICK OR TREAT!!!!! DON'T HURT ME PLEASE

happy halloween :) for you i will write the beginning of a time loop fic i really want to write for the terror, wherein jimmy fitzjimmy is looping to save one francis r.m. crozier's life. it's based on this awesome collection of polar explorer rpf fics i've come across called the loopverse; i can't recommend them enough 🙏 i can only hope that my homage to their work can do them justice 🥺🥺🥺

James remembers very little after the pistol fires. The energy leaves him, as if to fuel the Terror officers flitting around him like madmen. But he takes no note of the men, even when they usher him back into the wardroom and offer him a drink. Distantly, he recognizes the steward—not his steward, but the one belonging to— The arctic night dims the edges of his vision, and he sways in his seat. He has no recollection of having sat down, but he must have, numb and useless as his legs are. His heart pounds in his ears, and the weight of what has happened presses down around him like all the world’s atmosphere is bearing down on him at once. But his bubble of shock protects him, and though he can feel the cracks in the pressure the way he feels the ridges rock Erebus nightly, he is safe from collapse yet. That will change, but he clings to the darkness like a blanket. At some point he believes Terror’s first lieutenant asks him for his orders; he wants to tell him they aren’t his to give, to ask the captain, but his mouth doesn’t work. He is unsure if words ever leave his mouth. The lieutenant walks off, his fuzzy, dim form wringing his hands at his side. He, too, is unsteady in his step. James understands the situation, from a distance: they have lost four men tonight to the creature. One petty officer, a master, both belonging to the Terror but whose names he can’t recall. Thomas Blanky, the ice master. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, captain of the Terror and of the entire expedition. He understands his position very well, yes. But he feels nothing but a dull throb, so far away. It’s the throb of responsibility, of burden, one he wants nothing to do with. It doesn’t belong to him. It shouldn’t belong to him. This burden was for Francis, and so long as the responsibility stays on the edges of his periphery, the pressure blocked by his bubble of security, it will not be his. Nevertheless, his heart is quick and heavy in his chest as he closes his eyes and leans back in his chair, unbothered to move to a bunk and unsure if he even could. Tomorrow, he thinks as his thoughts escape him. Tomorrow he will deal with this.

👻 ask box trick-or-treat! 🎃

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazilian Scientist Explores Antarctic Cyclones After 15-Year Wait for Dream Expedition

Camila Carpenedo explains how atmospheric balloons can aid in understanding the climate crisis

Camila Bertoletti Carpenedo, 38, a researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, was supposed to embark on an Antarctic expedition in 2010. However, a humanitarian disaster led to its postponement. Nearly 15 years later, her dream has finally come true.

Sailing near the frozen ocean, Carpenedo describes how her atmospheric balloons can contribute to understanding the climate crisis.

"The project I am working on seeks to understand how the variability of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is linked to the South American monsoon.

For instance, the expansion of Antarctic sea ice in areas like the Ross Sea and the Indian Ocean influences the incursion of polar cold air over the Amazon during the austral winter—resulting in intense cold fronts.

Continue reading.

[mortuarybees]

official the pale beyond opinions:

Kasha and Cordell should've fallen in love

nutlee and Grimley also should've fallen in love

alternatively Grimley should've fallen in love with me shaw

I love kurt and hammond doing theater together in the epilogue I wish we could've had the option of choosing more wintertime recreation like balls, plays, the south polar times, etc, especially since we also get that dialogue from Cordell and Nutlee about the theater

I love how when you refuse to do anything about Grimley, even tho he wants you to do it Templeton gains approval before he goes to confront him on your behalf. The surge of loyalty is so cute

I also love the amount of like ambient conversations you overhear that also give you a sense of the more background characters and their personalities so they feel less like anonymous lackies of the person they follow. I became very attached to gnomes 💖

I should've been able to save the dogs by like putting enough effort into them and building up enough approval with them (reward for those of us who do morning and night pets) but I also understand why I can't 😢

It was cool that I kind of had to learn the mechanics of the cold and hunger effects. I lost two people pretty early on bc I didn't realize how those mechanics work and it lended to a nice sense of immersion. Shaw doesn't know how these things work and progress either so you're learning along with them

I liked the tent fire it felt like an homage to the terror without taking directly from it :)

Need the pale beyond 2 where appertton is launching a second expedition and shaw, either bc they're an appertton lackey now or bc they know with grim certainty there's no one better to lead it than someone who already did it and survived. and gets the gang back together :)