thylacinewings

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the discord server with a friend group i run decided theyd like to add an NSFW channel which so far has been terrible. for them. theyve found out new things about the world and about themselves ever since we added it and im entirely to blame

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in the words of the great Elizabethan wordsmith William Shakespeare, in Hamlet Act IV Scene V, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” or, in the words of the great Twitter wordsmith @Horse_ebooks,

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homunculus let out into the yard for a few minutes of recreational getting thrown from the roof time

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Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

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"I'm done doing vore in D&D, it's too complicated."

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This is your daily reminder to not be ashamed of making your life easy for yourself.

Cut your food into small pieces, make the font size 30 on your e book, use straws to drink, get a pen that’s comfortable to hold, take more naps, walk slowly, eat another cookie, buy velcro shoes, re-watch the part you couldn’t understand the first time, write things on your hands so you don’t forget it… whatever you want and/or need

Don’t let anyone tell you how you should be doing things. We don’t need to prove each other anything

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National Parks Service Crochet Patterns:

FISH

GEOLOGY

INVERTEBRATES

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BenMyhre

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*learns basic social skills well into my 20s that most people know by the time theyre like 11*

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hi neil! me again. won't be asking you for friend of dorothy origin sources this time promise. i also saw your talks at slu w a friend but they seem to have lost my question card so ill try here!

as someone whomst ppl seem incapable of being normal about, either worshipping the ground you walk on or despising you w a level of vitriol that seems disproportionate to your flaws, what advice do you have for aspiring writers who themselves might garner similar audiences on how to navigate intense parasocial relationships?

I guess the biggest piece of advice I have is it's only Chinatown. And for Chinatown, you can substitute Twitter or Tumblr or whatever.

I remember about seven years ago watching a post I'd made on Twitter turning into a dogpile. And it was particularly weird because in order for people to get upset enough to dogpile they had to pretend I meant something that I obviously didn't by it. And there were lots of people in the dogpile going "well, it would be rational not to take this absolutely literally but we now need to get shouty" and I was about to get very upset when my newish baby flipped himself onto his back for the very first time. And the Twitter nonsense became very trivial. And a day or two later it was forgotten.

There are people who have a relationship of some kind with someone they think I am, and those people don't really know me. And they aren't really part of my life. Whether they hate me or they love me. My friends are and my family are.

Or to put it another way, I remember a decade ago posting on Twitter that I was lonely. I had gone off on my own to write and I hadn't seen anyone in a few weeks. Someone replied incredulous that I could be lonely with hundreds of thousands of people following me and replying on Twitter, and I replied asking if anyone could bring me a cup of tea. But nobody did.

Nobody will.

And that's okay.

(And that's not to diminish actual relationships where you haven't met the person you are talking to in the flesh. But it's also, as the many catfish scams demonstrate, also not always the relationship you think you are in.)

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Normalize blocking people for making you uncomfy ❤