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.
Why do so many people make tiktoks while they're clearly driving. What the fuck. Stop that shit, you're gonna kill someone.
You’re asexual? Awesome! I’m bisexual. No one believes I exist either. *fist-bump*
The best response yet to my coming out as asexual (which was followed by an entertaining discussion on how best to harness the powers of invisibility that we so obviously possess)
Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.
Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?
Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.
Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.
Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.
You know, Finland.
I like when people say things like “respect blue collar workers!” and then the same people turn around and completely dismiss the years of training it takes to be able to do that type of work safely and effectively.
“Telling people not to do their own electrical work because it’s dangerous is classist bc not everyone can afford an electrician” “I can’t believe that plumber charged me so much money for less than an hour of work, what a scam!” “In the post-capitalist utopia everyone will just take turns doing all types of blue-collar work, instead of years-long apprenticeships we’ll just give them a course in high school or something” “Building and safety codes are just pointless bureaucracy meant to stop the average citizen from being able to build their own structures” “I would love to be a farmer and just hang out tending to plants all day”
These are all things I have seen on this website by self-proclaimed worker’s rights advocates and I hope I don’t have to explain how incredibly insulting and dismissive it is when it’s not outright dangerous. There’s a LOT that needs to be fixed about our current labor system but “pretending like training and safety protocols aren’t important” and “pretending that those jobs are actually really easy and any layperson can do them” are uh. Not good solutions.
I hope the billions they're spending on this old lady when we're in economic crisis cause an uproar.
I hope the fact they've stopped people on the roads so they can drive past unimpeded and has thus caused a disturbance in daily life in a city that's already so full of traffic causes an uproar.
I hope the fact they're going to spend millions on remaking every piece of currency to put the new fuckers face on it when we're still in an economic crisis where people are choosing between food and heat in their homes causes an uproar.
I hope the fact that they despite the fact they're royals and fuck those guys, they had to do a vigil standing by their dead mother's coffin for a while and they didn't stop the public from going in and gawking at them when they're literally mourning their mother causes an uproar.
I hope the fact they stuck five people and the coffin on a giant fucking jet plane to move this fucking corpse from Edinburgh to somewhere near London creating a mass of pollution because the train or the car or whatever is too fucking common causes an uproar.
I hope the fact they're trying to force everyone in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to care and that they're pushing so hard to make it out that we all loved this lady despite the horrors and bullshit this family have approved of and allowed to happen causes an uproar.
I hope the fact people have had their life saving surgeries postponed because of the funeral and will have to wait months to a year to get another appointment causes an uproar.
I hope the fact there's another one of these fuckers on their last legs of life already so this is going to happen again soon causes an uproar.
I hope this whole thing causes an uproar. I hope this uproar ends this fucking monarchy or at the very least robs them of this power and this access to government money to do this shit.
But it won't.
And if it does, there's no way in hell we'll hear about it. It'll be nipped in the bud in seconds I would put money on it.
Fuck the monarchy.
If a guy calls you ‘princess’ in a condescending manner, assert your newly appointed royal status and have him beheaded.
Shimizu Kiyoko (via incorrect-hq-quotes)
There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.
A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.
I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.
Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home)
Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for. EDIT: There are also some things people outside the EU can do, as well as additional things some people in specific EU countries like Germany and France can do that aim to solve this same issue as well. You can find that here. (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)
(Note: There was a petition for UK people but the recent politics stuff there means it's on hold and has to be resubmitted and that may take some time.)
Additionally if you want to keep up with this you can check out Ross Scott (Accursed Farms on youtube or his website) who has been posting monthly about this and deserves a lot of credit for all this work.
(I hope that's all the stuff I missed)
EDIT 2: I changed the link to go directly to the form instead, this SHOULD work!
I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.