Rustie

[brainrotdotorg]

i am shrunken down and brought to the gnome world and when i attempt to assimilate to their culture I use an acorn cap as a hat and they all laugh cheerfully at my silly mistake of wearing what they use as a bowl like a cap and though this is a transgression that would have humiliated me in my human life I am instead laughing alongside them at my humorous misunderstanding

[brainrotdotorg]

they ask me what I would like to eat and knowing that gnomes enjoy fruit i ask for my favorite fruit, an apple, and they all laugh raucously and say that i must be very hungry indeed to desire an entire apple rather than just a small chunk, and i go along with their joke and say that while my body may have shrank my stomach has not! and they all guffaw with delight until their faces turn red and see that my request is met and we all sit around a toadstool and share many apple slices together

[brainrotdotorg]

over my time spent with the gnomes, my antics are still regarded with much delight. though i am past the age in which i am confused by their customs and norms, i occasionally pretend to be clueless about simple and easily understood things, such as shock at how toads are as tall as I am. they all continue to laugh at my feigned surprise, and sometimes join in, asking me if I need any help distinguishing what berries are for eating and which are for painting. i laugh, too. there is a sense of grace that comes with my shortcomings amongst the gnomes. they are entertained by my misunderstandings, yes, because life is to short to not be jolly.

[brainrotdotorg]

i wake up one morning back at my original size. the small cavern in the roots of a tree that i lived in is destroyed in my sleep. my clothes, tailored from cut-up scraps of fabric, are shredded around me. i am a human again. i am horribly embarrassed.

the gnomes of the community gather around where i sit, all looking at me and exchanging glances with each other, none of them speaking the obvious. i can no longer stay here, now that i am not their size. but i was part of their community. i became one of them, indistinguishable from these people only from my past. how am i supposed to return to the world of the humans now? there is no life left for me there. that is not a life where i may fish for minnows in a babbling brook and feast off a bounty of raspberries. i am distraught. i cry.

my community comforts me. friends, all minuscule to me now, pat me wherever they can reach, nimbly dodging the tears that fall from my face. one of them offers me water. they don't have any containers that are big enough for me, they apologize, so just this acorn cap filled with morning dew will have to suffice.

i take the acorn cap and look at it in my hands. it is so small now. with a sniff, i put it atop my head.

the gnome chuckles. then laughs. then bends at the waist, bellowing with laughter, supporting himself on my knee. then i am laughing too, face red, tears still falling, and my community of gnomes laughs with me as well, so loud that a flock of birds takes off in the distance, and i am still laughing even as i stand to my feet and lumber away, back to where i once came.

[yurionice]

[a-spoon-is-born]

that poor gay skeleton

[mrbenibo]

The “Jesus Christ!’ took me out.

[shitpostbot5k]

[anarchblr]

[polyesterdress]

[gay-irl]

Gay_irl

[josef-tribbiani]

Idk what hes saying but i agree

[increasedenthalpy-deactivated20]

rural america, rural china, and rural russia all have the exact same energy and acknowledging this is how we will achieve world peace

[therogueprofessor]

@uncle-beanbag

[uncle-beanbag]

Rednecks are worldwide

[loktonlucis]

[reverendputtyofficial]

[yfhe]

[architectureofdoom]

Large blocks of sulphur, a byproduct of upgrading oil sands at Syncrude Mildred Lake site, near Ft. McMurray, Alberta, Canada.

[daydreaming-of-puppiess]

[stream]

[jamesusilljournal]

p0stcard, @ale.png, 2018

[sasj]

Geometric Shapes / 200131

[shuhvon]

[ch4ru]

op can we please talk

[shitposteen]

No need to talk. Op already said everything periodt

[thenordroom]

Idk if you take requests but just in case you do could you share artist spaces? Like an artist’s loft or house? Either way thank you for this awesome blog 💕

Yes I will do that! I will post it sometime in the upcoming days! 😊

[thenordroom]

Hi :) I’ve made a post filled with artist homes. You can see the full post on The Nordroom (the regular blog) CLICK HERE because as you know Tumblr has a max. 10 photos rule. I will post images of these homes on Tumblr as well, but I thought I’d share the full post with you already. I hope it’s what you were looking for

[mylordshesacactus]

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.

[thejollywriter]

wow okay i’m crying now

[girlwithakiwi]

“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.”

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

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.

[armouredescort]

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.

[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.

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

Hopepunk is best punk.