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Normalness leads to Sadness

@memiskypirate / memiskypirate.tumblr.com

|| Videogame Tester || Translator || 29 || (She/her) (They/them) || @AlmostCrazyFanfictionWriter
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googledocs you are getting awfully uppity for something that can’t differentiate between “its” and “it’s” correctly

oho and now you’re questioning my adverb usage? you? you?

you fucking dare?

you try to change ‘tears’ to ‘years’ for no reason but don’t catch ‘imporint’???

hey quick question gdocs

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what the fuck

1. how the fuck did this post become so popular

2. everyone just commenting ‘QUERCHED’ is delightful

3. some people have suggested i use grammarly. this is letting the robots win and also would deprive me of the opportunity to complain about insignificant technical things instead of just wanting to scream over writing all the time

4. i use googledocs because i want access to my writing on multiple platforms and also because fuck microsoft 

5. the difference between [its] and [it’s] is that [it’s] is always used as a shortened form of [it is] and [its] is used as the possessive of [it]. yes, this goes against the usual practice of just tacking on an [‘s] when you want to indicate ownership. yes, english is absolutely a trash language.

btw, gdoc’s most recent transgression:

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noooope

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LITERALLY THE EXACT OPPOSITE MEANING OF WHAT I WANT, GDOCS

i’m sorry what kind of AI FUCKERY is going on here that you are trying to ADD IN ADVERBS FOR ME that could ENTIRELY CHANGE THE TONE from a neutral ‘He’d been young’ to something that would put emphasis on just how young he was and how long ago it was you cannot just THROW EXTRA WORDS IN LIKE THAT

‘he’d been so young’ I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU

OH MY FUCKING GOD ARE YOU SERIOUS

me @ everyone else using googledocs:

YOU

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amarits

I just listened to a podcast with an A.I. research scientist. She said if you wouldn’t trust autocorrect to be in charge of a decision, then you shouldn’t trust another A.I. with it, so… that’s something to worry about

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elfwreck

Grammarly is not better.

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vaspider

querched

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curlicuecal
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Hello you! You are a beautiful person (I love the HP Post on your blog!) and I wish you a great day 🌻

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omg thank you! 🧡 🧡 🧡 🧡 🧡

I wish you a great day also!

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reblogged
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midnightsera
me at 3am: yk, mental stability is good..
me: *clicks next chapter of the fic i’m reading*
me: … but dead gay wizards are better
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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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duckbunny

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.

this always leaves me sobbing. fuck.

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petermorwood

I wrote a post a couple of years ago, wondering why there hadn’t been a documentary or docu-drama about the ‘Carpathia’ rescue run.

There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another ‘Titanic’ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the “History” Channel?)

Here are a couple of stories about ‘Carpathia’:

As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life it’s said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.

Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said “There must have been another Hand on the wheel than mine…

There’s another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard ‘Carpathia’ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the ‘Titanic’s assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even when…

‘Carpathia’ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an “unsinkable” ship.

It’s easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.

Here’s Rostron and his officers…

…the ‘Carpathia’ stewards and cabin crew….

…some of her passengers…

…and some of the people they helped.

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joasakura

I will always reblog one of the few posts to GUARANTEE leaving me in an ugly sobbing heartfelt mess.

Godspeed Carpathia and your crew, your memories live on.

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catchymemes

IM SO PROUD?!!!!!!?!!! LIKE WEE MAN IS A FUCKING LEGEND?!!!!!?!!!!!?!

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trans-jesus

wanted to see a more recent update and

BOIS STILL GOING STRONG YEEHAW U GO LITTLE SCIENCE KID

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skullinitium

Every time I reblog this I just really hope Daniel’s doing well

i just wanna say i really support daniel in all of his endeavors and i hope hes having a good day

And I’m over here worrying about the time limit in my test

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juicetrump2

BOOST!

Oh wouldn’t this be tragic if word of this spread out everywhere possible?

I’m like 99% sure that per our new ridiculous law, simply sharing this would theoretically make someone who lives in Texas and passes the info to another Texan (who uses this service to abort) suable for one of those $10,000 anti abortion bounties. Even though the org can’t be sued.

So let me be clear I’m definitely not sharing it for any of my fellow Texans to use 😇

Please spread the word so that ANYONE WHO NEEDS AN ABORTION IN TEXAS KNOWS

that this illegal service is illegal and bad.

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Ok this wikipedia article is pissing me off so much 

yeah i’m gonna re-write this fucker

goddamn. there is so much bias in the first paragraph alone:

this is an EXCELLENT example of the way word choice and tone can be used to create bias and transform the truth to suit the writer’s purposes.

Here’s my re-write: 

i got rid of the passive tone (which distances Profumo from his actions), and changed the photo. notice how the original writer chose a photo taken before the scandal, portraying Profumo in a respected position of power, a powerful man seated at a desk. I chose a photo taken in the aftermath. Which would you say more accurately reflects the context? 

some other changes:

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“denied impropriety” like he’s some maiden aunt clutching at pearls. No, what he actually did was:

oh, and he wasn’t

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he was, in fact

after lying through his teeth. now here’s my favorite bit:

what does that MEAN? what the hell does that MEAN??? oh boo hoo hooey the Prime Minister’s self-confidence was damaged, how dreadful for the poor dear. the poor sweet man…

fuck that. in fact, Profumo’s actions

of the government, and rightly so.

oh, and the young woman in question was a model, not a “would-be” model. But ultimately her profession has no relevance here–what is relevant is that a middle-aged man in a position of power slept with a 19-year-old. I wonder what motive the original author could have had, to choose to emphasize her career over the fact she was still a teenager…

Words can be used to bend anything. Pay attention to tone. Pay attention to authorial intent. Pay attention to what is included and what isn’t. Question everything. But especially question the language used to describe historical and current events. Every writer has an agenda–look for it. Above all: 

Read critically.

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internetbt
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krispytm

He redeemed himself

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thighetician

The duality of Manguin

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a3battery

his girlfriend’s name is lulu and she doesnt deserve the naughty list for this. :C mac’s gone too far and dragged her down wish him. glad he redeemed himself

also look tux is such a bastard that taking him down = good behavior

THEY KEEP REFERENCING THE PIER INCIDENT saldkjfah its like his defining moment

im just losing my mind with penguin receipts right now 

and he’s pepper’s bf from above, who got on the good list while they had to call out tux for being lazy sldkjfa

u deserve ur spot in the 2020 poll mr. tux. go call out to UR girlfriend to get her food and maybe u can have a redemption arc too. see how well its working out for mr mac

REDEEMED HIMSELF U EVIL POLLSTERS

(since this started out as me wanting to check up on whether or not the penguins were alive, they ARE and u can meet them virtually BY THE WAY)

PEPPER IS MR MAC’S DAUGHTER??!??!

this entire family is problematic but lulu was framed and that’s my conclusion 

I’m so invested in the penguin drama

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It has literally always been a lie.  These lies have killed millions of Americans over the years.  It has cost the US Trillions of dollars in lost efficiency and higher healthcare costs over the years.  It has helped drag down the life expectancy of the US, meaning, ultimately, that Americans have lost hundreds of millions of years from their lives.

It was always a lie.

This bears repeating!

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anyskin

Incredible colorised footage from 1929 of construction workers on the Chrysler Building in New York.

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saurs4thtry

I’m just impressed that it has audio

If you wanted solid, definitive proof that the past did, in fact, happen, here it is.

I’m surprised the structure was able to support the weight of every set of BRASS FUCKING BALLS on all of those construction workers. Pre-safety gear/OCEA was wilding man.

The Chrysler Building had zero fatalities during construction. But the osha violations hurt my soul

TERRIFYING

Many of these men were Mohawk Native Americans! The Mohawk had a reputation as ironworkers and worked on most of the big interwar-era construction projects in NYC, also including the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge.

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dongcroncher

A lot of these dudes probably fought in WWI so that explains why they give absolutely 0 fucks about heights lmao

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