everything is copacetic

hi i'm alex and i am a human disaster

[escuerzoresucitado]

[draconym]

Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.

The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--

(paper towel roll falls on my face)

Sir David Attenborough, pleasantly: Success.

[draconym]

Me, 3am: But am I even deserving of love

The Steve Irwin That Lives In My Brain: Crikey, get a look at this art teacher! These are so important to the local area, right, because they create habitat for heaps of vulnerable critters like juvenile nerds, goths, and furries. I love finding these because they often have these great ornamentations that they can use to identify one another. Take a look at the piercings and tattoos, here. Absolutely gorgeous! Let's let this one get back to sleep.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“Cats don’t actually love you”

A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Cats love you so so much. But they will keep trying to eat plastic.

[polymoth]

The thing they don't tell you about fried egg runny yolk is that if you put it in a sandwich it will be the best most delicious thing and you can mop up the egg with the bread, but in exchange you Will get so so messy and covered in egg yolk

[bane-of-technology]

[major-knighton]

It was cocky and overconfident to call the Titanic "unsinkable" but one thing that's overlooked is that she was genuinely really, unusually solid. She could float even with 4 compartments fully flooded, which even a lot of modern day ships can't do.

And it's not like they were wrong about her being solid! Olympic, her identical sister ship, survived being torpedoed and then running over the U-Boat that fired that torpedo. Those ships were solid.

It's very clear that absolutely no other ship in 1912 would have been able to survive that collision, and it's a testament to the quality of the ship that she didn't sink in a few minutes Empress of Ireland style. Part of what makes the Titanic such a tragic story is that it isn't a group of rich idiots locking themselves in a shoddy iron barrel to go 4km underwater. It was 2200 people, most of whom were poor immigrants, on a reliable ship on a commonly-made journey, and then something went horribly, unpredictably wrong.

[professorspork]

#also the White Star Line never billed Titanic as unsinkable #the media kind of did though most of that was posthumous #but she was NOT officially advertised that way#and before anyone mentions the lifeboat thing: #it's a myth that lifeboats were removed for aesthetic reasons #and Titanic had WAY more lifeboats than was required or expected at the time #in a design environment where lifeboats were seen as deathtraps significantly less safe than staying with the extremely well-designed snip #titanic isn't a story of carelessness #no expense was spared on safety #and oh my god they did not lock third-class passengers in to die on purpose that is a movie it is fake (via @mylordshesacactus)

[gay-jesus-probably]

There WERE gates seperating third class from the rest of the boat, but those gates were. Literally just waist high fences. They were just there to mark 'hey you're not allowed past here' in universal language, and that was it. It was physically impossible to trap third class passengers in the ship.

What DID happen with a lot of third class passengers was just a case of really unfortunate circumstances - they had the worst steward to passenger ratio, they were the furthest down in the ship, AND they had the widest diversity of languages, giving them the least time to get out, and the worst communication barriers. And even then, y'know what many surviving third class passengers reported?

People did not evacuate third class. They knew the ship was sinking, and they stayed put, because of an overwhelming amount of learned helplessness - for the majority of these people, their lives had NEVER been their own, they were always in the hands of greater powers. So they stayed put, they waited to be ordered to leave, and when those orders never came... they died. Which is fucking awful, but... yeah, not really a design flaw; just the nature of the tragedy.

Anyways, all that aside, I also hate it when people smugly talk about how mOrE LiFeBoAtS would have saved more people, like. Dude, holy shit, the Titanic actually sank EXTREMELY fast, boats that size normally took the better part of a day to sink, she was gone in about two hours. More lifeboats wouldn't have done anything. They didn't even have enough time to launch all the lifeboats they did have - Collapsible A was launched with the sides still down, so all passengers were sitting in ankle deep water all night, meanwhile Collapsible B was never launched at all - it was swept overboard and wound up upside down in the water (with the one surviving radio operator, Harold Bride trapped underneath). The survivors on Collapsible B were mainly men, who managed to climb on top of it, and under the command of Third Officer Lightoller (highest ranked survivor), the men standing on the overturned boat kept it balanced and floating all night, while towing more survivors in the water.

This obviously had high casualty rates, but one of the survivors they towed in the water was the ships head baker Charles Joughin, the final person to leave the Titanic, as he managed to climb up to the top of the stern as it tipped, and calmly rode it down like an elevator while people were panicking and jumping; Joughin didn't even get his hair wet (the Titanic movie also lied about the ship 'sucking people down with it' btw). Joughin also spent the entire sinking drinking heavily, which probably helped him stay calm, and when he was rescued his only health concerns were mild frostbite in his feet, and a raging hangover, god bless.

Anyways as for the lifeboats not being fully loaded, that WAS a mistake, but not the crews fault - that was STANDARD PROCEDURE in the day, lifeboats were NOT meant to be fully loaded while still in the air, you were supposed to put some people in, send them down, the load the rest in the water; loading them in the air would cause their hulls to break from the weight. Now, the lifeboats on the Titanic DID have reinforced hulls, so they actually could be fully loaded in the air, which had held up in testing... but the crew and officers had NOT been informed of that fact. When they were launching full lifeboats near the end, Lightoller's admitted in his inquiry testimony that it was an extremely reckless choice being made out of desperation.

Anyways, if you are also a nerd and want to know how the Titanic sinking actually went down first hand, why not get it right from the primary sources? There was a US Senate Inquiry that began literally the day after the Carpathia arrived in New York, the British held their own inquiry later, and the full transcripts of both can be found here. Extremely interesting stuff - during Gugliemo Marconi's testinmony on the first day, you can literally see the inquiry realizing in real time that hey, why the FUCK isn't it mandatory for ships to have someone at the radio at all times in case of emergency? Really neat stuff.

[prinz-myshkin]

Bothersome beast, comforting friend

[myfairynuffstuff]

Konstantin Somov (1869-1939) - Open Door on a Garden. 1934.

[tsunamiwavesurfing]

goat fight. non-negotiable.

[sunfortune]

[freckled-heart]

#LISTEn listen most marvel fights feel so contrived and fake and like la-dee-da-superhero#but this one was REAL and had me on the edge of my seat and still does#partially bc of the street clothes not costumes#partially because steve is fighting 1 on 1 and gets stripped of his shield quick#and he has to show like his physical combat skills#and the ACTING on both their parts.. fucking ace#esp chris evans tho like his face looks PANICKED how often do u see captain fucking america panicked??#anyway in this essay i will (tags via @asterlark)

[dubiousculturalartifact]

I think it’s also very important that this is a fight in which the characters *actually interact with their environment* in a way that feels real. Like, yes, have superpowers but there’s no cartoon physics involved, no obvious sense that this was filmed on an empty set with a greenscreen and the background was added later, or that they’re filming without even the people they’re fighting being present, just ‘look over here and make a hand gesture’. The shield gets stuck in a car, there’s that awful moment of the knife sliding along the side of the van that cues up with the mounting tension in the soundtrack. Bucky’s arm impacts the pavement and actually dents it, etc. They’re jumping over/behind the cars and getting thrown into them/into the pavement in a way that feels more visceral than just ‘whoosh there was a wire & we CGI’d in the rest’. t has a sense of real world space to it, and that adds to the feeling of real world stakes.

[mikkeneko]

This is one of the few fight scenes I can recall seeing that makes a little knife look like a real threat. Like I am legit scared for Steve when that thing darts in, because he’s not wearing armor and it really feels like the WS could open him up like a can. I feel like movie fight scenes don’t usually hit that note with knives.

[sonneillonv]

It’s worth pointing out that this scene WAS filmed on a actual set with actual asphalt and cars (with fall pads and stuff, but still). They really were interacting with their environment.

But as a fight nerd, there’s one other thing I want to point out about this fight, and it goes back to @mikkeneko’s point about the knife:

This isn’t a magic fight.

Yes, they’re both super soldiers. Yes, WS has a vibranium arm. Yes, Steve has a vibranium shield. But there are no magic blasts going on here. There’s no wuxia and minimal wire-work (mostly protective for the actors).

WS shoots at Steve until he runs out of bullets because that’s the most efficient way to murder him. Steve either dodges or hides his whole body behind his shield because that’s the most efficient way to not get murdered. The shield gets thrown, caught, thrown back, wedged in a car. Then it’s a knife fight. Throughout, it’s really obvious that neither of them are fucking around. WS is trying to just straight-up kill Steve, Steve is trying to not die. No banter. No dick-measuring. No quips.

This fight is brutal, efficient, and not flashy. Steve’s knife defense is textbook, and aside from that cool little flip that was almost too fast to clock, WS’s attacks are textbook. He’s doing his best to control Steve’s defense and open a hole to wedge that knife in. Steve’s doing his best to control that knife hand and keep just enough space between them that he can close those holes before WS can get to them. It’s telling that he’s paying so much attention to the knife that when WS finally gets through his guard, it’s with his empty, vibranium hand. (Still no idea why he tosses him instead of crushing his windpipe though, that was 100% movie logic.)

When Steve does that flying knee at WS, that’s not about flashy martial arts moves, that’s about brutal efficiency. Your knees and elbows are the hardest points on your body. Steve can engage in fisticuffs with normal people; he can knock out hitler over 200 times. He could also break his knuckles on WS’s face before doing any appreciable damage, and we watch him figure that out. So it’s not kung fu, it’s muay thai. It’s krav maga. Those flips aren’t for show - that’s pure Jiujitsu, the ruthless throws that are supposed to segue into joint locks and dislocations. That is the way to take your opponent apart, literally. He was trying to rip WS’s non-vibranium arm out of its socket.

That pile-driver? That was meant to break WS’s neck. A normal person would die instantly if Captain America pulled that WWE shit on them. We are into the gritty shit now. We have two extremely strong, extremely skilled men who are just trying to kill each other because the only way to win this fight is to die last, and it shows.

They scramble for position through the fight. When one move fails, they don’t bother breaking apart before finding the next-most-efficient killing move and trying that. This is what two people who are actually trying to murder each other look like - most street scuffles stay on the ground once they get there and don’t involve this much skill, but we can excuse that because it’s Captain America and the Winter Fucking Soldier. I still recognize the blocking of this fight as a real fight, not a spar. The urgency, breathlessness, the pragmatism, the messy transitions between moves as you just keep trying to improvise faster than the other guy… that’s all correct.

There’s no magic. There are fists, feet, elbows. There’s a shield and there’s a knife - the first and oldest human-made tools of war. There are chokes. There are joint locks. Not a word spoken. And it helps that they are really there - landing on cars, landing on asphalt.

No other MCU fight even comes close unless you’re including the tv shows, because that Daredevil long-shot hallway fight was pretty fucking badass too.

[willow]

i think its important to shut the fuck up sometimes

[taylorswift]

You belong with me. 💚💛💜❤️🩵🖤

Letter on my site :)

[kitsnicket]

Unfortunately my body doesn’t know the difference between someone not responding to me because they’re busy, and being shot in the chest 27 times in a row

[wolves-willow]

ITS MARCH YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

[jaesrri]

[zipstick]

[tentacleteapot]

your unreliable narrator fucking bit me

[charl0ttan]

thats not how they told it

[izzy444angel]

this is me all day

[damienhaaas]

FAMOUS AUTHORS

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KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

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Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

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Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

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Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

[science-junkie]

… and here is a gift for all of us.

[goddess47]

So I can find this again! Great list!

[clairificusrex]

Don’t lose this post

[creepymutelilbugger]

[troutlawyer]

Grandmas were so right about puzzles and knitting and crocheting and solitaire and reading slow and slippers and baking and watching deer in the backyard send post