the magician

obsessed with this heraldic beaft i saw on twitter

The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world's best preserved 17th century ship

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Kinda funny that the best example of its kind is the one that sucked as bad as it possibly could.

Oh, it was *ridiculously* bad. That initial post says “from the sea floor,” but that implies it made it out to sea.

So Gustavus Adolphus is king when Sweden is fighting wars all over the place. They need more ships, so he commissions four of them, two big and two small. The Vasa was supposed to be one of the smaller ones. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” Because Gustavus Adolphus keeps ordering changes. Like, add twelve more feet to the keel! Pile on the carvings! Add another gun deck for the hell of it! It got even worse when Sweden lost ten ships in a huge storm, so now they needed the Vasa *yesterday*. But Gustavus Adolphus is STILL demanding changes. So the shipwright scales up the measurements to try and make things work. Which might have worked, except the ship was being worked on by Swedes, Finns, Danes, Sami people. Communication is hard enough, but also it turns out that there are two different types of rulers being used by the workers. One is in Swedish feet and one is in Amsterdam feet. Amsterdam feet were only eleven inches long. (There’s a joke there I’m too tired to make.)

Anyway, because of that, the port side is heavier.

Okay, so you have to imagine the Vasa, with its hastily-scaled-up measurements, its *seven hundred* decorative carvings, its sixty-fucking-four bronze cannons. It’s a goddamn mess, AND its center of gravity is way off. Except that’s not something you could measure with instruments at the time. What you’d do is, you’d put it in the water, then have a bunch of guys run back and forth from port to starboard a bunch of times to test if it’ll tip over.

The guys who did this test could only do it three times before the Vasa was like, “I think I’m gonna hurl,” and almost tipped over right then and there.

Everybody there is like, “… uh-oh.” The admiral conducting the test just sighs and goes, “If only the king were here,” because Gustavus Adolphus wasn’t, and maybe if he had been he would have seen they fucked up and decided to pull the plug. Oh, and those bronze cannons? They weighed down the ship so much that the lowest row of gun portals was almost at the waterline.

But. Sweden needed the Vasa. It needed it to go to war. At that time, it was the most expensive thing Sweden ever spent money on.

SO. It’s August 10th, 1628. It’s the port in Stockholm. There’s music, there’s festivities, everybody’s showed up to see the Vasa off. A few ships tug the Vasa out to the current, let her loose, she drops four of her sails, and off she goes.

For about thirteen hundred meters.

Then, a light breeze blows. When I say light, I mean light. But that was all it took. The Vasa flops to port, water flows into the gun portals, and down it goes, still in the fucking harbor with its masts sticking out of the water.

So when that original post says “recovered from the sea floor,” it means brought up from the *actual harbor*. Like, within sight of the docks.

Oh, oh! But cool story about all this. Remember those sixty-four bronze cannons? Yeah, Sweden kind of needed those back, so about three decades later in 1658, the Swedes go down and retrieve almost all of them with a diving bell. Which is kind of badass.

You know that post about how angels and telephone towers are biologically compatible? That’s how I feel about overgrown plants and industrial machines.

These two things can and SHOULD make offspring.

hate bluetooth headphones that talk. you are a machine you may NOT speak to me

when headphones beep sadly because their battery is low: oh you poor thing :( let me plug you in :(

when headphones say "battery low" in a human voice: Who Are You Stop Interrupting My Music

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

It's less obvious, but mem. get recipe for Mina is the flipside of this. That's him making himself useful to her work (the managing of the household). And while itv doesn't sound much like learning a whole new skillset, we're seeing Jonathan while he's wholly immersed in the professional, so making these asides into the domestic is extra noteworthy (Mina, by contrast, is at her leisure updating a friend). He's not saying "oh yes I've been practicing my knife skills so I can help chop vegetables" but he is thinking domestically at a moment when we would reasonably be expected to be wholly focused on the task at hand (especially given that singlemindedness is one of his core character traits).

It's a tiny example but it's evidence of him participating in the feminine sphere in a way that parallels Mina much more overtly trying to participate in the masculine sphere. They're oriented overwhelmingly towards each other, and both seeking to serve the marriage community across homosocial gender lines.

one day i will be recognized for my contributions

this looks like a poster for Grease

excuse me

OH. can’t believe I forgot about such an important part of art history my apologies

you're laughing. charles dickens had a son named plorn and you're laughing

HE HAD A SON NAMED

WHAT

NICK I LOOKED IT UP AND SAW NOTHING OF THE SORT IS THIS A PRANK

technically his name was edward but everyone called him plorn

Edward “Plorn” Dickens. my god.

I have something worse

oh???

imagine getting stuck with the nickname Plorn

imagine getting sent to live in the Australian outback when you were sixteen

WHY WERE THEY SO CRUEL TO MY BOY PLORN

I have an answer to that one too

The face of a man whose father nicknamed him Plorn.

Born without a groove 😔

The Snake River and canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho 

#look driving over the snake river was a deeply comical moment during our first family road trip#I was driving and my dad was riding shotgun with the American atlas out as we’re picking our way through Idaho#I’d been driving through flat farm country and sod fields for hours#I see a slight change up in the road ahead but nothing really looks different there’s just rails next to the road#dad is scoping out the route ahead and says ‘huh I think we’re coming up on the snake river’ and just like that the *ground disappears*#there is no warning or change in geography we just go over this bridge and suddenly we’re looking down over this enormous river gorge#I am all ‘no SHIT dad holy moly holy smokes LOOK at this we are stopping I am pulling this bitch over’

need a bi4bi t4t m/f pairing where the girl is a giant freak and not in the "cute manic pixie" way but in the "unethical experiments in my fucked up laboratory" way and the guy is a golden retriever who thinks he can fix her. and he brings her cute bento lunches and she's like "bradley shut up put on your fucking gloves and hold this possum down so i can graft these giant grasshopper legs to it"

your brain is unfathomably colossal

is it just me or is NASA weirdly aggressive in their article about black holes?

can a black hole destroy the earth?

no, you idiot.

black holes aren’t planet gluttons, you bitch.

and the earth isn’t some weak-ass planet that would just fall in to a black hole like a sucker.

and that dumbass sun that we’ve got isn’t big enough to make a black hole like other stars.

you fool.

This reads like an exhausted doctor explaining that no, you fucking moron, vaccines do not cause autism. 

YALL REALLY DO BRING THIS BACK EVERY SEPTEMBER

I just noticed that September is spelled wrong

it’s the 17th of august

I think ive said it before but you really gotta feel bad for oedipus that wanting to fuck your mother got named after him. He really did not want to do that . It is central to oedipus rex how badly he didnt want to do that. Dick move by freud

knights but in an arthropod kind of way. the shell molts and they keep getting bigger

#smaller more vulnerable knights taking refuge in the cast-off shells of larger knights (kimchee-jamboree)

i don’t want to derail my own post but i just have to address

I’m sorry??????? You “KNOW” nobody on THIS hellsite

The