Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.
after a suicide attempt in 2016
deformititties
“When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all? All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess. The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly. Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says. Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy. Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do. It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin. And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.”
excerpt from Cherry by Mary Karr, context being after a suicide attempt at age 13
Some context: Texas and Arkansas share a corner border. Now, Texas is FECKING HUGE and there are many, many parts of Texas that cannot visit Arkansas overnight, but there are parts where it’s no trouble at all.
However, those places of Texas that are close to Arkansas, do not include “close to Fort Smith, Arkansas.”
The closest Texas gets to Fort Smith is about 185 miles (about 300km), at “a little closer than Texarkana.” (Dallas, fwiw, is about 275 miles/450km from Fort Smith.)
So the dad in this story drove at least SEVEN HOURS round trip, to pick up a bushel of plums for his little girl, in the hope that some almost-out-of-season fruit would convince her to go on living.
dandelions are magic. literally tiny suns in the grass that turn into the moon and then the stars when you blow on them. fucking insane.
Fucking insane
holy shit
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
- The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)
- The Monster of Sentan
- The Witch’s Cat
- Raise Both Children
- Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)
- Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)
- My Arch Nemesis Cynthia
- Pirates and Mermaid
- Eindred and the Witch
- The Demon King
- The Cornerwitch
- Grandmother Beetroot
- Apocalypse Daycare Worker
- Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon
- New Year Saga
- A Story About Changelings
- Ranger in the King’s Forest
- The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit
- Goblin Men (Canines)
I am in love with you /p
adding the Doctors Without Borders one
I LOVE tumblr storytime, so here’s a bunch more your weekend reading. Enjoy!
26. Haunted house
33. Narrative Town
35. Robot Apocalypse
37. Kushiel
38. Tooth Fairy
39. Alien abduction
42. Space cousins
WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD
XP/98 remix
aloe-jelly
ok what the fuck
pumpkinnqueenn
It sounds like some digital boss theme
I had to draw this.
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.
I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.
I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation.
I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.
It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post.
And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.
If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.
I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.
A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic.
They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.
If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried.
Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.
You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.
It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.
ANIS MOJGANI x ALEXANDER HARDING
‘For Those Who Can Still Ride In An Airplane For The First Time’, spoken word, uploaded on Youtube on 20 Apr. 2009;
Visible Light series (2010), photography
Panels 1 - 10
I found this on twitter by user Kingfisher & Wombat. https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1568685612168892423?cxt=HHwWjsC-2ZjQi8UrAAAA Thought it was too good not to share. First comic in quite a while that’s got me in tears, ‘cos it felt like hope, and, well, what with everything…
Of course, it’s from @ursula-vernon. I should have recognized.
Thank you.
A snake story, based on an experience I had while I was in Florida.
Image description: A four page black and white comic of my tortoiseshell cat, Bunny, complaining that I won’t let her in from the screen porch.
Page 1
Panel 1: A small tortoiseshell cat sits on the other side of a glass door, looking up sadly, saying, “Mama! Mama, help! I’m in the screen porch!”
Panel 2: She scratches at the door. “Mama! Mama I’m trapped! I’m trapped in the screen porch! Mama!” she cries.
Panel 3: She looks through the glass with her sad, innocent expression. “I see you, Mama! Can’t you hear me? Why won’t you let me in? What have I done, Mama!”
Panel 4: The left corner is dominated by a close up of her face, as she reminisces about the cat tree in the screen porch. We see her perched on the very top, looking out over the backyard.
She says, “Was I not grateful enough, Mama? You gave me a throne, here in the screen porch! A place where I could look down upon the world as a god!”
Page 2
Panel 1: While she’s perched atop her cat tree, it begins to rain outside. Bunny looks askance at it from behind the screen.
“But I couldn’t touch it, Mama!” she narrates, now in boxes instead of word balloons, “I could see the rain lavish the earth, but never feel its cool caress!”
Panel 2: A paw rests on the screen. On the other side, two birds chirp, unbothered by the presence of Bunny.
“I could smell the blood of the song birds, but never taste its warmth! I lived as Tantalus in this screen porch, Mama!”
Panel 3: Sitting on a cushioned chair, bunny looks out over the yard, barred from her by the porch screen.
“Tormented by what I could never reach!”
Page 3
Panel 1 : Another reminiscence, this time of Bunny running through the open door to the screen porch earlier that day while I was taking out the garbage.
“And yet I returned, again and again and again! Was that my sin, Mama? Is this my punishment? To be condemned forever to a hell of my own choosing?”
Panel 2: Returning to the present, Bunny looks up from the otherside of the door, her eyes wide.
“Is this what you call justice, Mama?” She says. “Is this what you call love?”
Panel 3: From Bunny’s perspective we see me; I am ignoring her, going about my business. She calls out to me, “Answer me, Mama! Mama!”
Panel 4:I glance back at her, unmoved by her cries. “Mama!” she yells.
Page 4
Panel 1: Pulling out we finally see more of the wall which has the door to the screen porch. Directly beside it is a cat door that goes through the wall, out into the screen porch. Another cat, Bunny’s sister Maggie, is coming through the cat flap with no issue.
I say, “ Bunny, I know you know how to use the cat door.”
Clawing at the window, tears in her eyes, Bunny screams “MAMA!!”
End ID.
I feel like “is this what you call justice, Mama? is this what you call love?” is going to enter my “cats being dramatic” lexicon the same way “you KICK miette?” and “father is…evil?” have.
motivational posters 9000
You are a villain famous for “killing” heroes. In reality, heroes come to you to fake their deaths.
Sometimes they try to pay you.
You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.
It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.
“How much?”
The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.
You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.
“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”
There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.
You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”
“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”
oh my god yall remember that Irish grandad spongebob looks back on his life video
the guy has a fucken youtube and does MORE of em and he's only got like 5k subscribers yall PLEASE watch these im riveted
the spongebob one:
scooby doo one:
wait i forgot theres another one heres the pokemon one
the "almost christmas" meme really captures the essence of ace attorney, which is funney hijinks that just get absolutely heartbreaking so fast. do the non ace attorneys know. do they think we're just going apeshit over a Funney Moment. do they know that "almost christmas means it wasn't christmas" is the turning point, the turnabout, the first moment of hope after the closest phoenix ever comes to horrible and painful failure, after he very nearly failed to save the man he'd been trying to save for 15 years? do they know? do they know?
before playing ace attorney: idk anything about ace attorney but everyone ships the red and blue rivals, ive heard aa is a comedy game that doesnt get too serious so i bet this is some klance bullshit
while playing ace attorney 1: man edgeworth sucks. haha this is a funny game with a few serious moments. wait. wait hang on. wait youre telling me WHAT happened in the elevator????? youre telling me THATS why phoenix became a lawyer—
after playing ace attorney: i am going to sob on the floor
imagine. imagine you knew a boy when you were young, unflinchingly good and idealistic, who'd stand up for you against, what was to you as a child, your entire world. imagine he was taken from you, suddenly and without warning, when your friendship had just begun to blossom and deepen. imagine you never stopped thinking about him. imagine that the goodness he showed you kept inspiring you, simmering in the back of your mind, inspiring your path. and then you saw him in the news — and they were saying that all the good in him was gone, that he was the worst of the system you'd one day be a part of, and you don't believe it, of course you dont believe it, so you double down, determined to see him again. and then you see him again, and he's everything they said he was, cold and ruthless and cruel. but you don't doubt, not for a moment, and in only your second confrontation he breaks, calls out the truth against his own best interest, and tells you he has feelings for you But Bad Ones Trust Me.
and then he's framed for murder, and you're facing off against a man who's been unbeaten for longer than you've been alive. and he's winning, he's got the trial down to a science.
imagine the boy you dreamed of saving for 15 years is declared guilty of a murder he didn't commit.
and then imagine the other man who stood up for you back then rushes in past the last moment, and mercifully is allowed to testify, but it doesn't seem like it'll do any good. too little, too late, and the boy who used to represent the best of the world to you is going to be branded a murderer
but the testimony has one little contradiction, one little thread to pull, and you're going to tug on it, wind it around your fingers till they bleed, shove it in the court's face like a shining sword as you return a favor for a debt that everyone else forgot
almost christmas means it wasn't christmas yet. happy 20 years, everyone
oh so this is gonna be one of those posts that serves as a calendar in my activity feed huh
Pineapple.
just-racoon-thoughts
do you like the color of the sea
Me, then whole scrolling: *please* let the punchline be
