lesboriqua
What
what if he was a scientist...
hands shaking while he tries to pipette because he's running on 6 cups of coffee and no sleep
figma-deactivated20161222
animedragonette
we all know what happens next
turkeyinmybutt
what happens i have no idea what this is
hint: 75% of the limbs in the before picture are not present in the after picture
Here's some fanart I had for a really fun mashup project! It boiled down to draw something in another style so! Here's some DC Danny :)
I colored most of these literally at 4am so I'm not super satisfied w all of them but I don't dislike them either
as someone who was already scared of the ocean uhhhhhh
Why I love “Choose Joy” over any other TAZ quote
Yall ever get that “why not just choose to be happy?!” Rhetoric as a teenager? That, make your own happiness shit? It always infuriated me.
The scene with Merle and John started like that. I visibly groaned. But it was later that really got me.
“I’ve found joy, honest to god, getting to know you. I’ve found joy playing chess with you. I haven’t enjoyed you know, getting my ass killed, but I find joy in whatever I do.”
Merle isn’t talking about choosing joy. It’s about finding it. It’s never about making the saddest moments happy just by willing it so, it’s about taking the good and the bad and finding moments of joy in between them. Embracing what is good and letting the bad highlight the joy. Merle isn’t happy getting killed, but he’s happy getting to know a friend. There’s joy in that, not because of or somehow through that.
“Because, at the end of the day, that’s all you got. It’s looking back at the joy you had, and the joy you found, and the joy you gave other people.”
This. This. This is why I love Merle. And to a greater extent, Clint. He’s not just “choosing joy” by changing his mood. He’s making an active choice to remember the good parts.
And that’s what makes this whole scene so special.
You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”
Well I see that, and I raise you this:
An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.
And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.
He’s crushed by the competition every single time.
Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker.
There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.
And he wins.
Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something.
The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.
So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.
He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”
There’s an international competition, and Main Character-kun and all his candy-haired rivals/peers/nakama/friends are being housed in the same hotel.
The night before the competition, some ungodly scream sounds from the Naruto-kid’s room. The rest of the cast rush in, flick on the lights, and find Naruto-kid sitting up in bed, his hair completely flat and utterly black, a pair of DIY salon gloves discarded next to his bed. He races to the mirror across the room, hands hovering in shock around his straightened hair, as though unable to recognize the boy staring back at him.
It’s… an unsettling act of personal vandalism, but Naruto-kid seems unhurt. After verifying he’s okay and reporting it to hotel security, most of the kids are content to go back to their own rooms and just double-check their own locks.
Most seem content…. Not all…
The next day, Naruto-kid is eliminated from the competition nigh-instantly. He’s given no chance to monologue about his ambitions, his friends, his hometown. Not even a second spared for a flashback to the bullying that became the formative motivator of his childhood.
No. He’s summarily eliminated by another candy-haired contestant. Naruto-kid, with his suddenly unassuming black hair, is dismissed from the arena. And Main Character-kun is distressed.
There’s a murderer on the loose. Just in no traditional sense. Another kid is shaved bald in the middle of the night, and eliminated from the competition the next day. Colored contact lenses go missing, and suddenly the red-eyed yandere girl doesn’t have a leg to stand on. She’s sent home without the slightest bit of fanfare. Someone funnels bleach into the sprinkler line, and a triggering of the fire alarm leaves a whole arena of contestants doused in the ruinous fluid. Their candy colors melt into brittle, tacky, bleachy off-orange. Not a single one survives that night’s round of eliminations.
Main Character-kun is still pink. He’s still gelled. He’s still dressed in fiery robes and platform sandals with a bandana cinched around his forehead. He hoards hair dye in his room and sleeps with one eye open. He can only watch in silence as this gruesome assassination plot unravels, without a doubt in his mind that he is the real target.
One night, there’s a knock on his door. And the twisting of a key. And the squeak of hinges swinging open. Main Character-boy’s breathing halts. His time has come.
He looks. It’s the blue-haired girl, the quiet one with self-confidence issues. Her hair is tied into twin pigtails. She’s carrying something in her right hand. Main Character boy braces for impact.
She flicks on the lights. He looks. They’re wigs, in her hand. Three of them. Purple Green and Orange, each primmed and poofed and curled to extravagant degrees.
“Here,” she offers, hand extended. “Take whichever you like. They’re extra.”
“Wait. Why…? What’s this–what’s happening?”
She takes a step forward, and she shuts the door behind her. With her free hand, she grips the blue hairline at her scalp, and she pulls back gently, revealing netting. She drops the blue hair to the ground, and pulls the netting free from her forehead, and a loose, unassuming bob of perfectly black, perfectly normal hair falls around her shoulders.
She’s unassuming in every possible regard, mundane in every sense, a girl to blend into the backdrop of millions.
“We’re not going home yet,” she says. “Not you, and not me.”
chrissy i want you to know im in love with this
The Comb and the Dye are in fact the real anime weapons of this series im so glad they’re wielding them as such
The Main Character girl wraps her hair back up in the netting and fixes her blue wig back in place. She takes a seat in the nearby desk chair and explains why she’s here. She’s suspected for a while that she and MC-kun are the same, both normal-looking people masquerading in this candy haired world. MC-kun had seemed just a bit too distraught during the Naruto-kid incident. That was when Main Character-chan first noticed him, and when she recognized his shade of candy pink hair by its bottle brand.
MC-chan explains that she had lived a very normal and unassuming life. She did Stage Crew in middle school for the drama club, always the unnoticed extra in the background, sweeping in silently, covertly, under darkness to handle the scene changes and wardrobe transformations. She honed her skills making props and costumes for the drama kids, til she was a master of needle and thread, dyes and combs, and props built from paper and plastic.
She thinks it was that attention-to-detail she cultivated in prop-design that let her finally See what MC-kun had seen—the Candy Haired world around her that constantly overshadowed whatever she did.
One day, she put on the wig. And she never looked back.
But she doesn’t know who the hair assassin is either, any more than MC-kun. There’s still strength in numbers. And she figures if they work together, their odds of survival are greater.
MC-kun agrees.
…
The next day is a free day for the kids competing in this International Competition. The morning passes with most of the contestants montaging through a romp in the city, tasting local cuisine and window-shopping around the market area and getting into Kodak-moment worthy shenanigans.
MC-kun and MC-chan steal away to a quiet park, sitting at a picnic table, putting pink- and blue-heads together to talk through all the info they have, and what options are open to them. They don’t get very far. A glasses-wearing girl appears from behind the bushes and stops them cold.
Glasses Girl is small and wiry, mousy in her frame. She has orange hair that poofs around her head, cropped at chin level, in a way that reminds MC-kun vaguely of a roosting chicken. Her glasses are enormous on her freckled face, and they capture the light, obscuring her eyes behind their glare.
“You two… you’re fakes, aren’t you? Both of you.”
MC-kun stops cold. MC-chan spins around in her seat, wide-eyed. “I don’t… I don’t even know what that means! Go away before we—”
Glasses Girl pulls an immaculate, highly stylized laptop from her bag. She flips it open with one hand, propping it on the table and typing furiously, too fast to even see her fingers. Audio begins to play from the laptop speakers.
“We’re not going home yet. Not you, and not me.”
“I hacked into your phone last night,” GG-chan states simply, head tilted toward MC-kun. “I’ve heard the whole conversation.”
“How?!” MC-kun asks. He holds his phone at a distance, like it’s suddenly venomous.
GG-chan shifts. Suddenly the glare of her glasses is no longer obstructing her eyes. Behind the coke-bottle look is an expression of pure brow-knitted confusion. “I don’t…. I don’t actually know. I just could.”
GG-chan was an art student. A not-very-good-at-all art student. And a very-much-below-average competitor in sculpting competitions. She was plain, and unassuming, and inconspicuous, and jealous of the better-established art students around her with their own flashy styles. Her peers wore giant non-prescription glasses; they dyed their hair bright colors and cropped it short to perfect hipster chique.
GG-chan tried to imitate that. But as a truly-not-fantastic artist, she couldn’t even pull that off. She dyed her hair, picked out glasses, overshot “hipster”, and landed firmly in “geek”.
She landed so firmly in “geek” that internationally-acclaimed hacker abilities spawned with her makeover. Suddenly she could break into anything, override anything, hack or fix or erase anything over a permanent wifi connection that followed her as its hotspot.
Her laptop never loses charge. Her bash scripts never fail. Her glasses always glint in the slightest bit of light and slide down her nose so that she has to keep her middle finger pressed firmly to the bridge at all times.
She’s afraid of being sent home in ruin, sent back to her life as a mediocre art student.
GG-chan wants to join the effort to not be eliminated.
…
A day passes. GG-chan has hacked all the email accounts of the registered contestants and has found nothing suspicious. MC-chan has spent her time crafting shorter-cut wigs to give to MC-kun and GG-chan as backups. MC-kun has been trying his best to understand what he’s gotten into. He bought a few extra obnoxious bandanas to bolster his obnoxious outfit, as if that might help.
They’re sitting quietly at lunch, eating in silence, with no new information to share and no desire to attract unwanted attention from the contestants around them.
“Ohhhhh my what is this? Has this pathetic posse of plebeians formed a little club oh how quaint!”
MC-chan chokes on her noodles. GG-chan startles. MC-kun groans.
The voice belongs to a platinum-blond boy, dressed to the nines, who’s sidled up to the table unannounced. He reeks of ambition and money and arrogance and a very particular high-end cologne, and he laughs heartily at his own joke. He flicks a lock of blond hair from his face, which all but sparkles.
MC-kun recognizes this kid. He was one of the first Candy Haired kids to declare an eternal rivalry with him.
“What’s it to you?” MC-kun challenges, already ticked off.
And the Rich Blond Rival Boy deflates. Comically. Pale and hollow-cheeked and exhausted, suddenly leaning against their lunch table, speaking in a rasp. “Please let me join you. I’ve been wearing this Gucci suit for two weeks straight I don’t have any others.”
No one answers immediately. No one has anything resembling an answer.
“Then buy another suit!” MC-kun says.
“Do I look like I’m made of m o n e y to you?!”
“YES.”
“Ah ha! Yes that is the point, well you see–” and RBR-kun pulls out a soggy PB&J from his bag, slumps into an open seat at the table, his eyes dull and matte, solemnly chewing his lunch. “Can one of you spot me like $1.50 for the bus ride to the competition arena tomorrow? I spent the last of my money on this bread.”
MC-kun: “What?”
RBR-kun: “I don’t have money!”
MC-kun: “Why are you ACTING like a rich boy if you DONT HAVE MONEY”
RBR-kun: “LOOK IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED OKAY.”
MC-kun: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED.”
And well, it just kind of happened. Rich Blond Rival Boy is as fake as they come. He grew up in a modest household, making money over the summer by doing yard work for neighbors. He was fairly frugal and quiet and unassuming, until his grandma bought him a nice tux for the school dance, and he dyed his hair platinum blond on a dare, and suddenly the world was in his pocket.
Suddenly he had connections in high places. Suddenly he could have wait staff doting on him at a moment’s notice. Suddenly he could summon helicopters at the snap of his fingers, and have any product imaginable, legal or not, air-lifted to him on a whim. Everyone was his pawn. Everything bent to his will. Ever since then he’s been unstoppable in his ambitions.
He just doesn’t have any of the actual money to maintain this. All his cards are overdrafted. His credit is in the toilet. Several different loan sharks technically own the rights to his immortal soul.
Rich Blond Rival Boy wants in on the League Of Background Characters, because he is utterly afraid of the ruin he faces if he is exposed. If the others get assassinated, they get sent home. If RBR-kun gets assassinated, the debtors will drag him out by his toes.
A scuffle erupts over by the lunch line before anyone can give RBR-kun an answer. It’s over in an instant. A shriek, a clatter, a tray and knife hitting the ground. The biker ruffian boy with the blue mohawk lies on the floor. His shorn-off mohawk spikes lie on the platter, as if being served to the cafeteria at large.
Worried murmurs break out in the crowd.
No one had seen the knife-yielder.
No one had seen anything.
As if the act were committed by someone impossible to even notice.
[chanting]
MORE KIDS MORE KIDS MORE KIDS
LAST PART, CONCLUSION AND ALL, AND IT’S LONG.
And the one thing worth noting: MC-chan is now MG-chan, as in Main Girl-chan, to avoid mixing up her name with MC-kun.
Enjoy.
There’s a sustained hush, like a breath held too long. It’s a blooming, crawling, clawing wave of realization that takes the cafeteria captive. Heads turn. Voices falls silent. Clueless candy-hair after clueless candy-hair takes in the murder scene, mohawk spikes presented so curiously, so esoterically plattered, as if part of the lunch selection.
The dish itself is a warning; MG-chan understands that much. She feels the bloodlust in the air. And it’s closer now. She edges her chair away from the table. Her nerves are alight.
“Run,” MG-chan says.
“Sorry?” MC-kun replies.
MG-chan kicks her chair back, lighting to her feet.
“Run!”
And at that moment, a sound like a cannon ball fires, the silence breaking. People startle at the noise, but it’s the boy sitting one table over – directly across from MC-kun – who jolts entirely sideways in his seat. He’s the contestant whose hair has been quaffed perfectly into a cartoon whale, pallid blue and deep ocean undertones brimming through his hairline. He stares forward, as if stunned. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay.
He turns to her slowly, and reveals the entire right half of his face has been consumed in a wad of bubblegum. He raises one shaking hand to his whale-tail, now webbed in gum, and he collapses.
And all hell breaks loose.
MG-chan has MC-kun by the shoulder before he can process it. They’re running. Them and GG-chan and RBR-kun. Them and almost everyone else, a breathing screaming mass of panic as people shove and knee and elbow their way through the crowd.
“Where are we going?” MC-kun asks. He’s stumbling to keep pace with MG-chan, one hand pressed protectively to the bandana on his forehead in danger of slipping off.
“Away from here. Outside.” MG-chan throws her weight against the cafeteria door. It slams open. “Wherever we’re not sitting targets.”
Their feet beat against the linoleum below, into the hotel foyer, but it’s no good. The bloodlust presence doesn’t fade. It does not grow weaker. Instead it gains on them, like heat, like a house fire that lashes out at their heels and trips them with each step. Another two kids go down with the sound of razor blades and a puff of shorn hair, like dandelion fluff blown in the wind.
MG-chan, MC-kun, GG-chan, and RBR-kun all burst out the hotel front doors – RBR-kun with a shriek and a graceful leap over a half-shaved unconscious student on the floor.
“How did he go down?! I didn’t even see him go down?!” RBR-kun shouts, pointing to the kid he vaulted. “Invisibility? Is the murderer invisible?!”
“Maybe super-speed. Really any superpower is possible among these people. We can’t rule anything out.” GG-chan has her laptop out, balanced precariously on the crook of her arm. She types one-handed while she runs. “If I can hack into the security cameras maybe I can activate the infra-red sensors and get a reading on—”
There’s a crack. A gasp. MG, MC, and RBR all look back to find GG-chan frozen in place. Her glasses are shattered, pinned to the wall beside her by a single needle-thin arrow.
“My glasses…” GG-chan blinks, and stares at her laptop like it’s something entirely foreign to her. “What is this? What was I–?”
MG-chan grabs her arm too. “Never mind. Run. Just run.”
One of the prettiest moments in winter is when the sun starts to come out again in like february/march but it’s still cold but that doesn’t matter because everything feels light and fresh and you walk outside without freezing because the sunshine is warming your face and everything is starting to wake up
*reading the part about the days getting longer* yeah!
*reading about how things feel light, fresh, & not freezing & things waking up* Wait what?
*looks out window* The sun set just after 5:00, & the days have been getting longer since december 21st, it’s almost -40c out, & that’s after global warming… What do you mean it’s not freezing out in march?
*remembers I live in canada, in the northernmost big city in north america* Oh
Apricity:
The warmth of sun in winter.
For the past decade, Simon Beck has been decorating the mountains with his stunning mathematical drawings, created by running in snowshoes across the freshly laid snow. Each image takes him up to 11 hours to make and covers an area about 100m x 100m, requiring him to travel up to 25 miles as he marks out the pattern.
Beck produces about 30 snow drawings every winter in the northern hemisphere, mostly in the Alps. He started 10 years ago doing it for fun and now it is his main occupation. “When you have a blank piece of paper you draw on it,” he says. “So drawing on a blank snowfall seemed like a natural thing to do”.
You can learn about the fine details of his process in this FAQ and see additional photos over on Facebook. He also published a book of his work titled Simon Beck: Snow Art.
Become a treasure hunter. Check out our archive.
Okay but like. Ratatouille from Linguini’s perspective tho
You’re some broke, awkward guy in his twenties who can’t keep a job down to the point that you Know that the letter your recently dead mom wrote to her also dead famous friend’s coworker contains Something about giving you employment. So you march yourself down to this fancy restaurant, submit yourself to verbal whiplash, fork over what might’ve been the last thing your mother ever wrote, and become the lowly janitor
Fine, right? I mean, shitty day/week/month/whatever, but you aren’t picky. You have a job, so you can pay rent. Except you accidentally spill like half a pot of soup and you panic. You literally got this job like fifteen minutes ago and you already fucked up. Rent is breathing down your neck so you do the Broke Twenty Something thing where you try to use water to hide the difference, throw in some spices because you have no idea how cooking works, and hope that no one notices despite the fact that one sniff tells you you fucked it up worse.
Then a rat fixes it.
A random rat fixes it.
(You’re broke, you’re mom is dead, and you cook worse than a rat. Imagine that.)
And somehow the soup gets served to a food critic that’s apparently well respected and now you have no idea if you’re gonna be flayed alive by your new boss or given a job you are in no way qualified for. Rent is still a thing.
Then you realize the rat understands human language and knows enough body language to communicate. Then you realize you’re own body is fucking weird because this completely random rat (that you had to explain morality to because he stole some herbs from your neighbor) is controlling your limbs by tugging on your hair. Also you become lowkey famous yourself because the rat is that good a cook.
And you have to go along with it because you need money to eat and not be homeless and you need a job to get money. It hasn’t even been a week.
At least your coworkers are nice enough. You get a crush on one of them and get a crash course on cooking and working in a kitchen and sexism and oh my god like at least three of your coworkers are technically criminals aren’t they?? Also your boss gets you drunk and asks you a bunch of weird questions about pets. You only wanted a job
(The rat makes you kiss the coworker you kinda have a crush on that’s been teaching you everything. What the fuck. You probably have to explain consent to a rat now. Luckily the coworker likes you back and is okay with the kiss, but still. What the fuck)
(Also the rat now seems to have a rivalry with your new girlfriend. What the hell, rat buddy? You’re literally the reason these two are together, and also the girlfriend has been working in the food industry longer than the rat has been alive probably, she clearly knows her shit)
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the rat walks up to you with some documents about how your dead mom’s dead famous friend is your dad. Also your boss did DNA tests on you behind your back (invasive much??). Now you own an entire restaurant because of a deadline in you’re secret dead dad’s will that was like two days away from being moot.
(I dunno about y’all, but I’d need to sit down for like seventy years at this point because there’s like fifty different layers of fucked up here. You grew up without knowing your dad, then you learn you’ve been working at his restaurant. He’s famous and his face is on a bunch of frozen food dishes. Both of your parents are dead. Your mom never told you or your dad about the being related thing for some reason. Your boss did a DNA test on you. You own a restaurant and you can’t even cook. Your new pet rat somehow got this information before you and can apparently read. Your father was a famous chief, your name is literally a pasta, and you can’t even cook. It’s only been a couple months, what the hell)
Now you’re famous and the food critic they lowkey caused your secret dad’s death is after you because he has a weird vendetta going on, and also your rat (who’s like your best friend at this point let’s be real) is acting weirder than usual, but at least you have a better apartment and get to talk about how much you love your super cool and smart girlfriend in public.
Next thing you know, your rat is sneaking other rats into the kitchen, you have to explain that a rat can cook better than you, and everyone quits in the middle of the day (what the heck, one of them probably killed a guy and another was in the circus. The rat thing is weird but like. You can roll with the punches. Why can’t they??)
So while you’re like having a panic attack because of this, your rat unionized his rat friends and now the kitchen is being run by rats. What can you do? You wait tables because what the hell, you’re in way too deep at this point.
(Also, side note, Linguini totally missed out on his true calling as a professional roller skater or something. Dude’s graceless even when he isn’t being piloted by a rat, but on a set of roller skates he’s friggin amazing)
Luckily, your super smart (maybe ex?) girlfriend comes back (even if the whole rat thing is still throwing her off, but hey. It’s prolly nice to have Somebody acknowledge the weirdness of this entire thing without jumping ship). Apparently the food your rat cooks is so good that the food critic that lowkey killed your dad reevaluates his entire life, but now he wants to meet the person that made the meal. What do you do — your (maybe ex?) girlfriend is the only other human here, do you say she made it or do you show him the rat?
You decide to make this Super Important Super Harsh food critic wait hours, then you and your (probably) girlfriend have to show off how you’re weirdly drift compatible with a rat. The food critic just like. Thanks you for the meal and leaves. What do you do?
Also at some point during the night the rats kidnapped your weirdly invasive ex-boss and a health inspector. So yeah, you should probably deal with that.
Then the food critic that lowkey lead to your dad’s death writes this inspirational piece that critizes critics, tanking his own career in the process, only for the health inspector to shut down your dad’s restaurant. But okay, the now ex-food critic now takes the money he made shattering the dreams of other chiefs and invests in your rat best friend’s dreams, and now he’s kinda your friend and you work at the rat’s restaurant with your amazing girlfriend.
All this happened in only a few months. You just wanted a job.
Linguini’s a fucking champion for putting up with all this istg
I need like a day to process this post holy shit. I have thoughts but I need to sit down
Good morning this is your periodic reminder that sunfish skeletons are complete nonsense
Lots of fish in there at least.
so i’ve seen this around a lot and i always felt like the version i listened to just. didn’t have everything? sO! i edited together my three favourite versions of the tik tok sea shanty! enjoy!!
(listen with headphones if possible!)
(yes i know the ending is bad oKaY-)
taakitz 8th bird kravitz au but the catch is that kravitz is a ghost who accidentally started haunting the starblaster like a week before takeoff
Ok but like,does taako start dating him a week after he knows about his existance like he does in canon? Like does he still speedrun the romance? Or
Taako, day 3 after Kravitz accidentally froze the coffee again because he doesn’t understand how the coffee pot works and he’s, you know, a ghost: I’m gonna exorcise this motherfucker, I swear to ALL THE GODS THERE ARE
Lup: ok
Two Hours Later
Taako: update: I am now dating the ghost
artists rendition of events immediately prior
wait hold on I’m back on this shit
Taako: and then you open the text app like this—
Kravitz: it’s not working
Taako: what do you mean it’s not working, even Merle can open his stupid text app
Kravitz: yeah well I’m about 800 years older than Merle so it doesn’t come as easily to me!
Taako: it’s a touchscreen! It’s intuitive! You just gotta hit things with your fingers!
Kravitz:
Taako:
Kravitz: I don’t—
Taako: you don’t have fingers, you’re a ghost
Kravitz:
Taako: I’ll see if Lup has a stylus laying around
Barry: so Lup and I are liches now
Kravitz: hmm
Barry: we, uh… did the disembodied spirit thing for a bit, so, uh…
Kravitz: mmm.
Barry: look man I’m trying to reach out, find common ground
Kravitz: uh huh
Barry: is this because we didn’t technically have to die and can still have our own bodies
Kravitz: IN MY DAY—
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 respondibility 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.
wow okay i’m crying now
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.
armoured-escort
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
This is human nature. Don’t give up on it.
Hopepunk is best punk.
Announcer voice: Fullmetal Alchemist, pause, Fullmetal Alchemist Maysketchaday